No. 410 East Ridge Street.

 

"This fifteen-room house stands on a beautiful site overlooking Marquette Harbor and Lake Superior. The nearly square Italian Villa with Second Empire detailing has a projecting central tower topped by a concave mansard roof. A wrought-iron balconet at the center of the tower is covered by a bracketed hood. A porch, supported by simple columns and ormamental scrolled brackets, wraps around the east and south sides at the ground floor. The house was designed by English immigrant Gregory (1833–1921), who, steeped in the stone building tradition of his native Devonshire, built it of roughly dressed, evenly coursed, variegated reddish-brown and white sandstone. The interior is fitted with woodwork finished in Marquette shops. The house was built for Merritt (b. 1833), his wife, and five children. Merritt was a pioneer industrialist and employee of the Lake Shore Iron Works (owner of the Iron Bay Foundry and Machine Shops), as well as an investor in mining companies, banks, and land. The Biographical Record: Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens of Houghton, Baraga and Marquette Counties, Michigan (1903) noted, “It is equipped with all modern appliances for pleasure and comfort, and is not only a pleasure to the eye and a haven of rest, but is also the seat of much hospitality.” The house in its solidity seems to demonstrate the financial and social success of its owner and the skill of its builder." - info from SAH ARCHIPEDIA.

 

"The Arch and Ridge Streets Historic District is a historic district located in Marquette, Michigan, running along Arch and Ridge Streets from Front Street to Lake Superior. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The district includes the Call House.

 

The residential core of the district is defined by ridge running east-and-west (known locally as simply "the Ridge"), which gives Ridge Street its name. The district includes spectacular residences built for some of the leading citizens of Marquette, as well as more modest houses for white- and blue-collar workers. Two public structures, the Peter White Library and First United Methodist Church, are also located within the district.

 

Seven of these structures are built from local sandstone. These include the Daniel Merritt House and St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral. A small cottage in the neighborhood was the inspiration for Carroll Watson Rankin's 1904 novel, The Dandelion Cottage.

 

The first construction in the Arch and Ridge Streets Historic District was in 1867, when Peter White built the first house on the Ridge. Most of the construction in the district took place over the next 35 years as other leading citizens of Marquette followed White's lead, including pioneer businessman and industrialist Hiram A. Burt, Charles H. Call, Daniel Merritt, Andrew Ripka, David Murray, Josiah Reynolds, Frank Bennett Spear, and James Jopling.

 

Marquette (/mɑːrˈkɛt/ mar-KEHT) is a city in Marquette County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 20,629 at the 2020 United States Census, which makes it the largest city in the Upper Peninsula. It also serves as the county seat of Marquette County. Located on the shores of Lake Superior, the city is a major port, known primarily for shipping iron ore. The city is partially surrounded by Marquette Charter Township, but the two are administered autonomously.

 

Marquette is the home of Northern Michigan University. In 2012, Marquette was listed among the 10 best places to retire in the United States by CBS MoneyWatch.

 

The land around Marquette was known to French missionaries of the early 17th century and the trappers of the early 19th century. Development of the area did not begin until 1844, when William Burt and Jacob Houghton (the brother of geologist Douglass Houghton) discovered iron deposits near Teal Lake west of Marquette. In 1845, Jackson Mining Company, the first organized mining company in the region, was formed.

 

The village of Marquette began on September 14, 1849, with the formation of a second iron concern, the Marquette Iron Company. Three men participated in organizing the firm: Robert J. Graveraet, who had prospected the region for ore; Edward Clark, agent for Waterman A. Fisher of Worcester, Massachusetts, who financed the company, and Amos Rogers Harlow. The village was at first called New Worcester, with Harlow as the first postmaster. On August 21, 1850, the name was changed to honor Jacques Marquette, the French Jesuit missionary who had explored the region. A second post office, named Carp River, was opened on October 13, 1851 by Peter White, who had gone there with Graveraet at age 18. Harlow closed his post office in August 1852. The Marquette Iron Company failed, while its successor, the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, flourished and had the village platted in 1854. The plat was recorded by Peter White. White's office was renamed as Marquette in April 1856, and the village was incorporated in 1859. It was incorporated as a city in 1871.

 

During the 1850s, Marquette was linked by rail to numerous mines and became the leading shipping center of the Upper Peninsula. The first ore pocket dock, designed by an early town leader, John Burt, was built by the Cleveland Iron Mining Company in 1859. By 1862, the city had a population of over 1,600 and a soaring economy.

 

In the late 19th century, during the height of iron mining, Marquette became nationally known as a summer haven. Visitors brought in by Great Lakes passenger steamships filled the city's hotels and resorts.

 

South of the city, K. I. Sawyer Air Force Base was an important Air Force installation during the Cold War, host to B-52H bombers and KC-135 tankers of the Strategic Air Command, as well as a fighter interceptor squadron. The base closed in September 1995, and is now the county's Sawyer International Airport.

 

Marquette continues to be a shipping port for hematite ores and, today, enriched iron ore pellets, from nearby mines and pelletizing plants. About 7.9 million gross tons of pelletized iron ore passed through Marquette's Presque Isle Harbor in 2005.

 

The Roman Catholic Bishop Frederic Baraga is buried at St. Peter Cathedral, which is the center for the Diocese of Marquette.

 

Lakeview Arena, an ice hockey rink in Marquette won the Kraft Hockeyville USA contest on April 30, 2016. The arena received $150,000 in upgrades, and hosted the Buffalo Sabres and Carolina Hurricanes on October 4, 2016 in a preseason NHL contest. Buffalo won the game 2-0." - info from Wikipedia.

 

Now on Instagram.

I well remember drawing this a couple of years ago with a simple writing pen while sitting on my couch in Toronto one evening. I had taken a trip to Spain a year or so earlier and had visited 3 main cities on the pilgrimage route to Santiago - Burgos, Leon, and Santiago.

This was an "impressionistic" conjuring of my memories of Santiago de Compestela in simple sketch form, It's one of the most interesting cities I have ever visited, Burgos and Leon were also deeply interesting to me, with very high quality gothic cathedrals in each (simply not present in the Americas). I suppose the idea came from a Paul Klee sketch/painting called "city of churches" I think.

I added watercolour to the pen sketch tonight and due to the fact that the pen was not waterproof, it smeared and smudged a lot. I kept going because the muddy colours were feeling something like my memories of the wet granite stone of the city. (I must say I wish I would have photographed it before I added the colour, but c'est la vie...) I added coloured pencil and pitt pen highlights to try to offset some of the muddiness, and also "tweaked" the colouration in "iphoto" a bit.

I'm not entirely happy with it, but it does capture some of my impressions of the city. The Cathedral dominates the old city, as does a large square with many small side streets leading into it. I recall many arcaded buildings, the green hills of Galicia in the distance, many steps leading into and away from the square, and of course the massive solidity and heavy decoration of the cathedral. The city impressed most at night I thought and that is why the sky is a deep dark blue.

I subsequently walked the pilgramage along a different route - the Portugese route from Porto - and the city was just as mysterious the second time I visited. I stayed for a few days afterward and basically wandered around the city and drank beer in the pubs.

I'd still like to visit this place again, it has a presence about it that has stayed strongly in my memory.

Excerpt from www.wellingtonadvertiser.com/council-agrees-to-proceed-wi...:

 

Hollis House

 

37 Henderson Street, Elora, also known as “The Hollis House”, is a pre-confederation single detached dwelling and considered significant because it is a unique example of a simple two-storey, three-bay, hipped roof dwelling built of local soft brick with Georgian-style elements that reinforce the principles of symmetry and solidity.

 

These elements are evident in the symmetrical façade and simple design and ornamentation.

 

The Elora Observer Newspaper identified two sources for locally manufactured soft brick, Preston’s Brick Yard (on the farm of business man and developer Mr. David Foote) and Conrad Doerbeckker’s in Salem.

 

Local stone and soft brick were the primary building materials in Elora prior to the arrival of imported building material after the first railroad service in 1875.

 

The home has double hung windows with radiating brick voussoirs over windows and front door and a hipped roof over the original house and vestibule that continues over the more recent two storey addition. On the east side of the original portion of the building, near the current front door and in a place of prominence, hangs the original school bell.

 

The historic front door circa 1845 is not original to the building. A sympathetically designed 2 storey addition was added in 2008, replacing a previous two storey rear addition on the same footprint. The adjoining mudroom and garage were added in 2009.

 

Historical/Associative Value

The building is one of sevenstructures constructed in this neighbourhood in the first decade of Elora’s history.

 

Built in 1865 for Arthur Hollis, it originally housed a dwelling on the lower level and a one room private school for 20 students on the upper floor.

 

The school closed in 1870 when provincial law required approved schools.

 

The property is significant for its association with many of Elora’s most influential citizens, including: Mary Hollis, private school teacher (Arthur’s wife) taught “the usual braches of a liberal education” there from 1865-1870; Robert Dalby (owner 1875-1884) who built the prominent flat-iron style Dalby House, a large Elora hotel and current landmark on Metcalfe Street; William Power (owner 1887-1942) who built the Merchant’s Bank on the southeast corner of Geddes and Colborne Streets and was a general agent for Massey- Harris implements; John Rennie (tenant 1907-1910), chair maker; Joseph Walser (tenant 1910-1914), furniture manufacturer, who moved to Elora in 1910 and established the Elora Furniture Company by building the 2 storey stone Little Folks Furniture Factory on the south side of the Grand River; Stuart Ross and E.G. Cumming (1920-1945); the James Ross Estate (1945-1968); and Colin Fox and Carol Bermingham-Fox (owners 2004 to present). Colin is an acclaimed Canadian actor, who performed on Broadway, at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, and in feature films and television, while Carol is a retired psychiatric nurse clinician.

 

The Hollis House is significant because it was built by the Stafford family of Elora, who built a significant number of homes, institutions and commercial buildings during a key development period in Elora from 1855-1955. The Elora Carnegie Library, St. John’s Anglican Church and both Methodist and Presbyterian manses are other examples of Stafford family construction.

 

The building is also significant for its contribution to institutional life in this part of Elora as it was one of three private schools in this area in Elora’s early development. The Hollis House operated as a school from 1865-1870. In the 1870’s, just down the street at 201 Smith Street, the “Misses Gilbert” rented the premises for a Boarding and Day School for young ladies and in the 20th century Jim Chalmers opened a private boy’s school, St. John’s, at 33 Henderson Street. Through their businesses in Elora during the 19th century, the owners of 37 Henderson Street provided loans, agricultural implements, mills, fairs and recreational venues for area farmers. Thomas Connon’s 1867 photograph of 37 Henderson Street abutting the cattle auction (on the grounds of present-day Hoffer Park) records an important turning point in the business history of Elora, namely the location of the Market Square and the relocation and growth of Elora’s Central Business District, from its original planned location on the south side of the Grand River to its present location on the north side.

 

The Hollis House is a local landmark at the south terminus of the view corridor along Smith Street. It is surrounded by several nearby church structures. This intersection was a hub of social activity in Elora’s early days.

 

Description of Heritage Attributes to be protected

– Height and massing of original 1865 two storey building

– Low pitched hipped roof

– Locally manufactured soft red brick exterior of the original building

– Brick radiating voussoirs over doors and windows of original building

– Size and pattern of door and window openings on original building

– Brick vestibule and original wood windows on the Henderson St. façade

Surprisingly, because the metals are such perfect expressions of archetypal energies, we can actually learn quite a bit about people by studying the properties of metals and the behavior of planets. That same correspondence exists in the human temperament. For instance, the leaden person is someone who has, like Saturn, lost their bid to become a star. They have accepted a mere physical existence and believe the created world is all that counts. The positive characteristics of the saturnine person are patience, responsibility, somberness, structure and realism, true knowledge of history and karma. The black messenger crows of Chronos bring black moods, depression and despair to us, but they also alert us to illusion and fakeness in our lives.

While we have already discussed the planetary archetypes, it is worth reminding ourselves at this point exactly how the alchemists looked on the relationship between the planet and its metal. They believed that the metals had the same “virtue” as the corresponding planet, that a single spirit infuses both the planet and the metal. In other words, the planet was a celestial manifestation and the metal a terrestrial manifestation of the same universal force. Therefore, the metals are the purest expression of the planetary energies in the mineral kingdom, which is the basis for material reality on earth. The next stage of evolution on our planet is the plant kingdom, and the alchemists assigned a metal and its corresponding planet to describe the characteristics of every known herb, flower, and plant. Similarly, on the next level in the evolution of matter in the animal kingdom, all creatures carry their own metallic or planetary signatures, which are expressed in their behavior. In human beings, the alchemists referred to the sum total of the cosmic signatures of the metals as a person’s “temperament.” Originally, that word referred to the metallurgical process of “tempering” or mixing different metals to produce certain characteristics in an alloy. Although the alchemists considered lead the lowest of the base metals, they treated it with a great deal of respect, as they did its corresponding planet Saturn. Lead was said to carry all the energy of its own transformation, and it was that hidden energy that the alchemists sought to free. To the alchemists, the ancient metal was a powerful “sleeping giant” with a dark and secret nature that encompassed both the beginning and end of the Great Work.

Lead is the heaviest of the seven metals; it is very tied to gravity, form, and manifested reality. It is also a very stubborn metal known for its durability and resistance to change. Lead products dating from 7000 BC are still intact, and lead water pipes installed by the Romans 1,500 years ago are still in use today. Alchemists depicted lead in their drawings as the god Saturn (a crippled old man with a sickle), Father Time, or a skeleton representing death itself. Any of these symbols in their manuscripts meant the alchemist was working with the metal lead in the laboratory or a leaden attitude in his accompanying meditation.Lead is a boundary of heaviness for matter. Metals of greater atomic weight are too heavy and disintegrate over time (by radioactive decay) to turn back into lead. So radioactive decay is really a Saturnic process that introduces a new characteristic in the metals – that of time. All the hyper-energetic metals beyond lead are trapped in time to inexorably return to lead. There is no natural process more unalterably exact than radioactive decay. Atomic clocks, the most precise timekeeping devices we have, are based on this leaden process. Geologists measure the age of radioactive rocks by how much lead they contain, and the age of the earth is estimated by taking lead isotope measurements. In many ways, lead carries the signature of Father Time.Native lead, which is lead metal found in a chemically uncombined state, is actually extremely rare. It is found in the earth's crust in a concentration of only about 13 parts per billion. Lead does not form crystals easily, and thus the pure mineral form is very rare and extremely valuable as rock specimens. Such elemental lead can also be found in very unusual “metamorphosed” limestone and marble formations that are equally rare.Surprisingly, lead is in the same group in the Periodic Table as gold, and when it occurs in nature, it is always found with gold and silver. In fact, the chemical symbol for lead (Pb) is from the Latin word plumbum, which means “liquid silver.” We derive our words “plumbing” and “plumb bob” from the use of lead in those applications. In the smelting of silver, lead plays an important role by forming a layer over the emerging molten silver and protecting it from combining with the air and splattering out. The volatile molten lead covering is gradually burnt away, until only the pure silver metal “peeks out” (in the smelter’s terminology) in a stabilized form. Thus, lead protects and even sacrifices itself for the nobler metals.The planet Saturn and its metal and the planet have the same symbol (L) in alchemy. The Hermetic interpretation is that the symbol is basically the cross of the elements that depicts the division between the Above and Below or spirit and matter. The lunar crescent of the soul is below the cross, representing the manifestation (or entrapment) of soul below in matter. Despite these associations with the noble metals, lead itself never makes it to such heights among the metals. The silvery luster of fresh cut lead quickly fades, as if it were “dying” before your eyes. Furthermore, alchemists considered lead to be “hydrophobic” or against the life nourishing archetype of water. Lead ores lack the slightest water content and tend to form machine-like structures.The most common ore of lead is galena, which also contains the noble metals silver and gold. Galena is lead sulfide, a favorite of rock collectors because of its distinctive cubic shapes, characteristic cleavage, and high density. In fact, the structure of galena is identical to that of natural table salt. The two minerals have exactly the same crystal shapes, symmetry and cleavage, although galena crystals are thousands of times larger. Some galena may contain up to 1% silver and often contains trace amounts of gold. The large volume of galena that is processed for lead produces enough silver as a by product to make galena the leading ore of silver as well Galena definitely has the signature of lead. Its color is silver gray with a bluish tint. The luster ranges from metallic to dull in the weathered faces, and the isometric crystals are opaque to light. The massive crystals of galena almost always take the form of a cube or octahedron, and the cleavage is perfect in four direction always forming cubes. Because of the perfect cleavage, fractures are rarely seen and the dark crystalline structure is nearly perfect.Lead is also found in other sulfuric minerals like calcite and dolomite, as well as lead oxidation minerals such as and anglesite and cerussite, which is found in the oxidation zone of lead deposits usually associated with galena. Some formations show cerussite crusts around a galena core as if the act of oxidation was frozen in time. Cerrussite is lead carbonate and also a favorite of rock hounds. Its very high luster is due mostly to the metallic lead content, and just as leaded crystal glass sparkles more brilliantly because of its lead content, so too does cerussite. Cerussite has one of the highest densities for a transparent mineral. It is over six and a half times as dense as water. Most rocks and minerals average only around three times the density of water. Cerussite is famous for its great sparkle and density, and its amazing twinned (or double) crystals. The mineral forms geometrically intricate structures and star shapes that simply amazing to behold – sometimes the twinned crystals form star shapes with six "rays" extending out from the star.When freed from its ores, lead metal has a bluish-white color and is very soft – capable of being scratched by a fingernail. With its dull metallic luster and high density, lead cannot easily be confused with any other metal. It is also malleable, ductile, and sectile – meaning it can be pounded into other shapes, stretched into a wire, and cut into slices. However, lead is a dark, sluggish, base metal. Of the seven metals, it is the slowest conductor of electricity and heat, the least lustrous or resonant. Its Saturnic signature of heaviness is expressed not only in its being the heaviest metal but also in its tendency to form inert and insoluble compounds. No other metal forms as many. Although it tarnishes upon exposure to air like silver, lead is extremely resistant to corrosion over time and seems to last forever. Lead pipes bearing the insignia of Roman emperors, used as drains from the baths, are still in service. The surface of lead is protected by a thin layer of lead oxide, and it does not react with water. The same process protects lead from the traditional “liquid fire” of the alchemists – sulfuric acid. In fact, lead bottles are still used to store the highly corrosive acid. Lead is so inalterable, that half of all the lead in the world today is simply recovered from scrap and formed directly into bullion for reuse.Lead is truly a destroyer of light. It is added to high-quality glassware (lead crystal) to absorb light reflections and make the glass clearer. Lead salts in glass are not changed by light but change light itself by absorbing it. Incoming light in lead crystal meets with high resistance, but once it is within the glass, light is immediately absorbed or dispersed without any reflected light escaping. Sheets of lead are also impermeable to all forms of light, even high energy X-rays and gamma rays, which makes lead the perfect shield against any form of radiation and is why it is used to transport and store radioactive materials.Lead is an extremely poor conductor of electricity and blocks all kinds of energy transmission. Indeed, one of the signatures of lead is its ability to “dampen” or absorb energy. Unlike other metals, when lead is struck, the vibrations are immediately absorbed and any tone is smothered in dullness. Lead is an effective sound proofing medium and tetraethyl lead is still used in some grades of gasoline as an antiknock compound to “quiet” the combustion of gasoline.Thin lead sheets are used extensively in the walls of high-rise buildings to block the transmission of sound, and thick pads of lead are used in the foundations to absorb the vibrations of street traffic and even minor earthquakes. Lead sheets are widely used in roofing to block solar rays, and lead foil is used to form lightproof enclosures in laboratory work. Ultimately, lead corresponds to the galactic Black Hole that absorbs all forms of radiation and light.Lead reacts with more chemicals than any other metal, however, instead of producing something new and useful, lead “kills” the combining substance by making it inert, insoluble and unable to enter into further chemical reactions. Its salts precipitate out of solutions heavily and copiously. Lead has the same effect in the plant kingdom. It accumulates in the roots and slows down the “breathing” process in plants. Young plants are adversely affected by even the smallest amount of lead in the soil.Lead is poisonous and accumulates over time in the bones of the human body, where it cannot be flushed out. It has also been found in high concentrations in gallstones and kidney stones. The old alchemical graphic for lead – a skeleton – was grotesquely appropriate. The symptoms of lead poisoning (known as “Saturnism”) are lack of energy, depression, blindness, dizziness, severe headaches at the back of the head, brain damage, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities and mental retardation, antisocial behavior and anger, atrophy of muscular tissue and cramping, excess growth of connective tissue resulting in a rigid appearance, rapid aging, coma, and early death. Rats fed only 5 parts per million of lead had a lifespan 25% shorter than normal rats. Children are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, and it is believed to be an important factor in stillborn fetuses. Children with more than just 0.3 parts per million of lead in their blood suffer a significant slowing of brain function and corresponding drop in IQ. Lead in paint has caused mental retardation and premature aging in hundreds of children who ingested old flaking paint from the walls of their homes. Lead paint was used extensively until the poisonous effects were documented in the 1960s. Because of its lasting durability, lead paint is still used outdoors in advertising and the yellow lines on highways and curbs. The subtly controlling aspect of those applications is another signature of lead and of “leaden” persons in general.Not surprisingly, lead has found use as an insecticide and was even once considered for use as a military weapon. Lead metal reacts violently with fluorine and chlorine to form the highly poisonous gases, lead fluoride and lead chloride. Lead is also used in all kinds of ammunition – another appropriate application of lead’s esoteric signature as Father Time and the Grim Reaper. There are many research studies linking lead exposure to anger and violence, especially in adolescents. One recent study of all counties in the United States conducted by Colorado State University revealed that the murder rate in counties with the highest lead levels were four times higher than in counties with the lowest levels of lead.More benevolent uses of lead are in storage batteries, covering for underground and transoceanic cables, waste plumbing, shielding around X-ray equipment and nuclear reactors, solder, pewter, fine lead crystal glass, and flint glass with a high refractive index for achromatic lenses.Even the elemental metal carries the seed of its own redemption. The alchemists knew that Fire is lord over lead, for the metal has a low melting point and is easily separated from its ore by roasting in an open flame, and the metal itself melts in a candle flame. Lead expands on heating and contracts on cooling more than any other solid heavy metal. (Silver is the opposite and is considered an antidote to lead.)Perhaps owing to its dual nature, lead carries deeply hidden within its structure the fire of its own transformation. Many lead salts reveal a whole rainbow of brilliant colors, with the solar colors of yellow, orange, and red predominating. This is why lead has been used in paints for so many centuries. Finely divided lead powder is pyrophoric (“fire containing”) and easily catches fire or erupts spontaneously in flames. When made into a fine powder, lead metal must be kept in a vacuum to keep from catching fire. Otherwise, it ignites and burns down to a bright yellow ash, revealing its deeply hidden solar signature. So, the wonder of lead is that hidden deep inside the gray, dead metal is a tiny, eternal spark that is the seed of its own resurrection. In the eyes of alchemists, this makes lead the most important metal despite its unattractive darkness. For dull lead and gleaming gold are really the same things, only at different stages of growth or maturity.The Secret Fire inside lead is really the alchemical basis for transforming lead into gold, and correspondingly, gives mankind hope for its own spiritual transformation. That tiny spark of light in the darkest part of matter makes resurrection part of the structure of the universe. So, deep down inside, the metal lead also yearns to be transformed. It wants to rise in the air and fly, leave matter and form behind, and be free as Fire. Lead unites two contrasting forces: rigid heaviness and revivifying inner fire. Archetypically, the lead process is concerned with death and resurrection. Greek myth says that after death our soul is put on a scale, and the weights of the scale are made from lead, the metal that carries Saturn's signature.Lead is used in magical rituals, spells, and amulets to promote contact with deep unconscious levels (the underworld), deep meditation, controlling negativity, breaking bad habits and addictions, protection, stability, grounding, solidity, perseverance, decisiveness, concentration, conservation, and material constructions (buildings). Pick up a hunk of lead and the first thing you notice is its weight – its connection to gravity. It is that connection to something beyond matter and light, the very form of the universe that is the physical basis for this experiment. During the winter months, preferably on some clear night in late January or early February, go outside and find the planet Saturn in the northern sky. Relax and try to focus all your attention on the golden sphere. Relax completely with an open and quiet mind. Become empty and let the planet influence you. Do this until you feel a real connection with the distant planet. Continue gazing upon Saturn and place a piece of lead metal in your hand. You should be able to feel a strange resonance building. That eerie, cold vibration is not your imagination. It is what alchemists refer to as the “call of lead.” You are experiencing the metal’s true signature or living correspondence with its planetary twin.The strange connection between lead and Saturn has been documented by modern scientists, who have shown that lead compounds react differently depending on Saturn’s position in the sky. For instance, solutions of lead nitrate produce the greatest weight of crystallization (or manifestation) during February, when Saturn rules the sky, and the least during June, when Saturn is barely visible. Lead compounds also exhibit different properties when Saturn aligns with other planets. For example, lead sulfate solution rises 60% higher on strips of filter paper during conjunctions of Saturn with Mars than at other times. It is also known that the ease of making lead solutions (the “solubility coefficient” of lead) varies with the position of Saturn relative to the other planets. NASA is even considering a series of astrochemical experiments to see if the Saturn-lead effects become more pronounced in outer space.Surprisingly, because the metals are such perfect expressions of archetypal energies, we can actually learn quite a bit about people by studying the properties of metals and the behavior of planets. That same correspondence exists in the human temperament. For instance, the leaden person is someone who has, like Saturn, lost their bid to become a star. They have accepted a mere physical existence and believe the created world is all that counts. The positive characteristics of the saturnine person are patience, responsibility, somberness, structure and realism, true knowledge of history and karma. The black messenger crows of Chronos bring black moods, depression and despair to us, but they also alert us to illusion and fakeness in our lives. Surprisingly, because the metals are such perfect expressions of archetypal energies, we can actually learn quite a bit about people by studying the properties of metals and the behavior of planets. That same correspondence exists in the human temperament. For instance, the leaden person is someone who has, like Saturn, lost their bid to become a star. They have accepted a mere physical existence and believe the created world is all that counts. The positive characteristics of the saturnine person are patience, responsibility, somberness, structure and realism, true knowledge of history and karma. The black messenger crows of Chronos bring black moods, depression and despair to us, but they also alert us to illusion and fakeness in our lives. Surprisingly, because the metals are such perfect expressions of archetypal energies, we can actually learn quite a bit about people by studying the properties of metals and the behavior of planets. That same correspondence exists in the human temperament. For instance, the leaden person is someone who has, like Saturn, lost their bid to become a star. They have accepted a mere physical existence and believe the created world is all that counts. The positive characteristics of the saturnine person are patience, responsibility, somberness, structure and realism, true knowledge of history and karma. The black messenger crows of Chronos bring black moods, depression and despair to us, but they also alert us to illusion and fakeness in our lives. Because the lusterless metal is so “dead” and resists interaction with other substances, it is used as containers for acids, like automobile batteries, and is used as a lining in pipes that carry corrosive substances. Similarly, the lead tempered person is like an acid-proof container that stores up caustic feelings and anger. Phrases like “acid tongued” and “vitriolic” have their origins in this alchemical process of storing negative emotional energy.On the psychological level, lead is symbolic of a person’s inertness and unwillingness to change. There is a denial of all higher or spiritual energies, and the alchemists often portrayed the leaden person as lying in an open grave or hopelessly chained to matter in some way. A feeling of being trapped in material reality is symptomatic of a leaden attitude. Leaden people are stubborn, unyielding, and often control other people by making them wait. They must always be right, rarely accept blame or admit to being in error, and have no real regard for the truth of a situation. They may be religious but not spiritual. They tend to be suspicious of genius and inspiration, which they will often attribute to fantasy, They feel threatened by freedom of thought and expression, and sometimes use ridicule or try to “push people’s buttons” to control it. They tend to be very uncreative, judgmental, and smug.On the other hand, leaden people are grounded, earthy, and practical. They are good friends during times of bereavement – a rock of support at funerals and deathbeds. Such people secretly crave stimulation, excitement, and new ideas. They gravitate to people who supply energy and entertainment in their lives. This craving for stimulation often makes them focus on nervous energy instead of higher inspiration. Therefore, Saturn’s children can be very reactive and excitable instead of lethargic, as they try to escape from their prison of matter.As soon as bright, fresh lead metal is exposed to air, it forms a dull-gray oxide layer called the “litharge” that resists any further chemical interaction. In alchemy, air is associated with spiritual energy, and lead reacts to it by instantly forming a barrier or blocking it. Likewise, one of the distinguishing characteristics of someone with a lead temperament is their lack of interest in spiritual ideas. There is also a general lack of interest in life in general, and leaden people often seem lazy, lethargic, or unresponsive.In the individual, lead absorbs the inner light or insight necessary for personal growth and blocks all outside “radiations,” such as attempts at spiritual instruction by others. Because psychological lead absorbs both the deeper vibrations of intuition and higher spiritual energies and aspirations, the person with a lead temperament is uninspired, unimaginative, and lacks that creative spark so necessary for positive change. Before long the lead person starts to feel trapped in his or her dull environment and seeks out excitement, death-defying feats, lively people, and challenging conversation. Their favorite color is often red, and unconsciously, they are seeking the alchemical element of Fire. Fire is one of the Four Elements that represents activity, energy, creative thinking, and transformation. Fire is the tool alchemists use to begin the transmutation of lead into gold as well as transform leaden consciousness into a golden awareness of higher reality. In the laboratory, the changes in the metal and in the alchemist take place simultaneously. Otherwise, there can be no real transformation. The alchemists transmuted the Lead temperament using the Fire operation of Calcination. Physically, lead and Saturn rule the bones, teeth, spleen, and slow chronic processes such as aging. The therapeutic effects are contracting, coagulating, drying, and mineralizing. Saturn-ruled plants enhance the structures of life. They give a sobriety of disposition, en-abling one to see limitations. These plants give steadiness, solidity of pur-pose, subtlety, diplomacy, patience, and an ability to work on the physical plane better.Saturnic or leaden energies are needed for those who have a hard time finishing pro-jects or for those with plenty of ideas but never realize them. Alchemists seeking to produce physical effects found in saturnine elixirs the essential vibratory rate that enabled materialization. Alchemists seeking to produce physical effects found in saturnine elixirs the essential vibratory rate that enabled materialization. Generally speaking, any other elixir mixed with a Saturn elixir will be earthed, which makes them of great value when working on physical plane phenomenon. Their physical therapeutic properties become refrigerant, anti-pyretic, sedative, styptic, and astringent.For instance, if one mixes a saturnine elixir with a mercurial one, the alchemists believed it would release knowledge contained in secret magical manuscripts or in ancient hermetic traditions, because the Saturn-Mercury vibration contains all hidden knowledge of an esoteric nature within it. Alchemical oils were mixed in the same way. For example, to treat leukemia, alchemists would prescribe an equal mixture of lead oil and gold oil. The alchemists made an Oil of Lead that was good for “growth of bones after breaking, strengthening the skeleton, osteoporosis and atrophy of the bones, stimulation of the spleen, drying tissue, reducing secretions and discharges, stopping bleeding, reducing fever, increasing patience, and stopping visions and an overactive imagination.” They also suggested it for hallucinations due to neurological disorders that have delirious after-effects such as encephalitis and post-traumatic stress syndrome. In the “like cures like” philosophy of homeopathy, lead is used to treat sclerosis, the hardening of bones and arteries, which is the hallmark of old age and signature of lead. The homeopathic name of lead is Plumbum metallicum. Native tin is known as stannum, which is the Latin word for tin and also gives the metal its chemical symbol (Sn). The alchemical symbol is K, which shows the lunar principle of soul above the cross of the elements or emerging from the darkness of matter.

Tin is a shiny, silvery-white metal that is malleable, somewhat ductile and sectile, and seems like a perfected form of lead to the casual observer. In fact, the Romans called tin Plumbum album or “white lead.” Tin resists weathering and does not oxidize, and tin utensils buried underground or lost at sea in sunken ships shone like new when rediscovered after hundreds of years. “Tinkers” were gypsy craftsmen who wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood in Europe repairing tin kettles and utensils or melting them down and recasting them. Native or elemental tin is extremely rare in nature and is found with gold and copper deposits. The metal was considered “semi-noble” in ancient times and was used for jewelry in Babylonia and Egypt. The Romans used it to make mirrors, and it was used as coinage in Europe at one time.

Tin has a highly crystalline structure, and due to the breaking of these crystals, a "cry" is heard when a tin bar is bent. Unlike lead, tin has pleasing acoustic effects and is used in the making of bells. The crystals in common grey tin have a cubic structure, but when heated or frozen it changes into white tin, which has a tetragonal structure. After further heating or freezing, white tin disintegrates into a powdery substance. This powder has the ability to “infect” other tin surfaces it comes in contact with by forming blisters that spread until all the metal “sickens” and disintegrates. This transformation is encouraged by impurities such as zinc and aluminum and can be prevented by adding small amounts of antimony or bismuth to the metal. The sickness of tin was called the “tin plague” and was the scourge of tin roofs during Europe’s frigid winters. The mysterious effect was first was first noticed as “growths” on organ pipes in European cathedrals, where it was thought to be the work of the devil to disfigure god’s work.Tin metal has only a few practical uses and most tin is used in alloys. Bronze is an alloy of 5% tin and 95% copper, and the development of bronze by humans marked a new age of advancement known as the Bronze Age. Most solder is a combination of tin and lead; pewter is also an alloy of tin and lead. Other tin alloys are used to make tin cans and tin roofs, and tin has significant use as a corrosion fighter in the protection of other metals. Tin resists distilled, sea and soft tap water, but is attacked by strong acids, alkalis, and acid salts. When heated in air, tin forms tin oxide, which is used to plate steel and make tin cans. Other uses are in type metal, fusible metal, Babbitt metal, and die casting alloys. Tin chloride is used as a reducing agent and mordant in calico printing. Tin salts sprayed onto glass are used to produce electrically conductive coatings, which are used for panel lighting and for frost-free windshields. Window glass is made by floating molten glass on molten tin to produce a flat surface. A crystalline tin-niobium alloy is superconductive at very low temperatures, and shoebox-sized electromagnets made of the wire produce magnetic fields comparable to conventional electromagnets weighing hundreds of tons.The distribution of tin on earth follows an ecliptic at an angle of 23.5 º to the equator that is an exact track of the orbit of Jupiter slicing through the planet. Even stranger, these jovian forces seem to form tin veins that zigzag through the rocks in a lightening bolt pattern. This is no haphazard effect, but an astonishing confirmation of Jupiter freeing the metals from their Saturnic prison on earth. Goethe was just one great alchemical philosopher who believed this. “A remarkable influence proceeds from the metal tin,” he wrote. “This has a differentiating influence, and opens a door through which a way is provided for different metals to be formed from primeval rocks.”Tin ore minerals include oxide minerals like cassiterite and a few sulfides such as franckerite. By far the most tin comes from cassiterite or tin oxide. Reduction of this ore in burning coal results in tin metal and was probably how tin was made by the ancients. Cassiterite is a black or reddish brown mineral that has ornately faceted specimens with a greasy, high luster. It is generally opaque, but its luster and multiple crystal faces cause a sparkling surface. Cassiterite has been an important ore of tin for thousands of years and is still the greatest source of tin today. Most aggregate specimens of cassiterite show crystal twins, with the typical twin bent at a near-60-degree angle to form a distinctive "Elbow Twin." Other crystalline forms include eight-sided prisms and four-sided pyramids. Cassiterite is sometimes found in nature associated with topaz and fluorite gemstones.Tin has a surprising affinity for silica and shares its crystalline structure. In the jovian ring on our planet where native tin is found, the metal lies in silica veins of quartz and granite. In the body, high concentrations of tin and silica are found in the boundary layer of the skin, and tin reacts with silica acid in many of the “shaping” processes of growth. In the Middle Ages, sick people were served food on a tin plate and drinks in a tin vessel to help them regenerate and recover their strength. Today, we know that tin acts as a bactericide and pesticide.Native tin is known as stannum, which is the Latin word for tin and also gives the metal its chemical symbol (Sn). The alchemical symbol is K, which shows the lunar principle of soul above the cross of the elements or emerging from the darkness of matter.

 

Tin is a shiny, silvery-white metal that is malleable, somewhat ductile and sectile, and seems like a perfected form of lead to the casual observer. In fact, the Romans called tin Plumbum album or “white lead.” Tin resists weathering and does not oxidize, and tin utensils buried underground or lost at sea in sunken ships shone like new when rediscovered after hundreds of years. “Tinkers” were gypsy craftsmen who wandered from neighborhood to neighborhood in Europe repairing tin kettles and utensils or melting them down and recasting them. Native or elemental tin is extremely rare in nature and is found with gold and copper deposits. The metal was considered “semi-noble” in ancient times and was used for jewelry in Babylonia and Egypt. The Romans used it to make mirrors, and it was used as coinage in Europe at one time.

Tin has a highly crystalline structure, and due to the breaking of these crystals, a "cry" is heard when a tin bar is bent. Unlike lead, tin has pleasing acoustic effects and is used in the making of bells. The crystals in common grey tin have a cubic structure, but when heated or frozen it changes into white tin, which has a tetragonal structure. After further heating or freezing, white tin disintegrates into a powdery substance. This powder has the ability to “infect” other tin surfaces it comes in contact with by forming blisters that spread until all the metal “sickens” and disintegrates. This transformation is encouraged by impurities such as zinc and aluminum and can be prevented by adding small amounts of antimony or bismuth to the metal. The sickness of tin was called the “tin plague” and was the scourge of tin roofs during Europe’s frigid winters. The mysterious effect was first was first noticed as “growths” on organ pipes in European cathedrals, where it was thought to be the work of the devil to disfigure god’s work.Tin metal has only a few practical uses and most tin is used in alloys. Bronze is an alloy of 5% tin and 95% copper, and the development of bronze by humans marked a new age of advancement known as the Bronze Age. Most solder is a combination of tin and lead; pewter is also an alloy of tin and lead. Other tin alloys are used to make tin cans and tin roofs, and tin has significant use as a corrosion fighter in the protection of other metals. Tin resists distilled, sea and soft tap water, but is attacked by strong acids, alkalis, and acid salts. When heated in air, tin forms tin oxide, which is used to plate steel and make tin cans. Other uses are in type metal, fusible metal, Babbitt metal, and die casting alloys. Tin chloride is used as a reducing agent and mordant in calico printing. Tin salts sprayed onto glass are used to produce electrically conductive coatings, which are used for panel lighting and for frost-free windshields. Window glass is made by floating molten glass on molten tin to produce a flat surface. A crystalline tin-niobium alloy is superconductive at very low temperatures, and shoebox-sized electromagnets made of the wire produce magnetic fields comparable to conventional electromagnets weighing hundreds of tons.The distribution of tin on earth follows an ecliptic at an angle of 23.5 º to the equator that is an exact track of the orbit of Jupiter slicing through the planet. Even stranger, these jovian forces seem to form tin veins that zigzag through the rocks in a lightening bolt pattern. This is no haphazard effect, but an astonishing confirmation of Jupiter freeing the metals from their Saturnic prison on earth. Goethe was just one great alchemical philosopher who believed this. “A remarkable influence proceeds from the metal tin,” he wrote. “This has a differentiating influence, and opens a door through which a way is provided for different metals to be formed from primeval rocks.”Tin ore minerals include oxide minerals like cassiterite and a few sulfides such as franckerite. By far the most tin comes from cassiterite or tin oxide. Reduction of this ore in burning coal results in tin metal and was probably how tin was made by the ancients. Cassiterite is a black or reddish brown mineral that has ornately faceted specimens with a greasy, high luster. It is generally opaque, but its luster and multiple crystal faces cause a sparkling surface. Cassiterite has been an important ore of tin for thousands of years and is still the greatest source of tin today. Most aggregate specimens of cassiterite show crystal twins, with the typical twin bent at a near-60-degree angle to form a distinctive "Elbow Twin." Other crystalline forms include eight-sided prisms and four-sided pyramids. Cassiterite is sometimes found in nature associated with topaz and fluorite gemstones.Tin has a surprising affinity for silica and shares its crystalline structure. In the jovian ring on our planet where native tin is found, the metal lies in silica veins of quartz and granite. In the body, high concentrations of tin and silica are found in the boundary layer of the skin, and tin reacts with silica acid in many of the “shaping” processes of growth. In the Middle Ages, sick people were served food on a tin plate and drinks in a tin vessel to help them regenerate and recover their strength. Today, we know that tin acts as a bactericide and pesticide.

Flowers last longer in tin vases, and food has been preserved in the tin cans (actually a thin layer of tin on iron) for over a century. Beer (ruled by the jovial Jupiter) is said to taste best from a tin mug. Jupiter rules growth, the metabolic system, the liver, and the enrichment of the blood from food. Jupiter therapeutic effects are anti-spasmodic and hepatic. Jupiter-ruled plants preserve the body and promote healthy growth and are the natural healing herbs of the planetary system. They af-fect the mind in such a way as to promote an understanding of ritual form from the highest point of view, and religious leaders, doctors, lawyers, etc. will find great benefit from jovian herb remedies. They also attune one to the wealth vibration and open up channels for growth and expansion, materi-ally as well as spiritually.Jupiter controls the circulation of blood in the human body. If mixed with a solar herbal eider, it will give the alchemist access to the highest plane. Jupiter-Mercury combinations produce insight into the philosophical principles of any system and their part in the cosmic scheme and provide an intuitive understanding of the great spiritual masters. This particular herbal mixture also produces a lightheartedness and gaiety, which can be very useful to those with a predisposition to depression or gloominess. The physical properties of such a mixture are anabolic and antispasmodic.The alchemists made an Oil of Tin that was used to treat the liver (jaundice, hepatitis, cirrhosis), certain types of eczema, liquid ovarian cysts, inflammatory effusions, pleurisies, acne, water retention, and certain types of obesity. This oil was said to be excellent for someone "loosing shape." The oil was also used as a sweat inducer, wormer, antispasmodic, cathartic, and laxative.The polar (opposite) metal to tin is mercury, and Oil of Tin was said to be an excellent antidote for mercury poisoning, and likewise mercury was said to balance the bad effects of tin. Tin and mercury oil combined are said to provide deep insight and cure lightheadedness and certain phases of manic-depressive syndrome.The homeopathic form of tin is called Stannum, a remedy which is said to strengthen and regenerate muscle and brain tissue. It is also a remedy for the joints and connective tissue of ligaments and cartilage. Stannum is allegedly beneficial in liver disease and is used for congestion, hardening, encephalitis, and other illnesses where the fluid balance is upset.During the early Spring, preferably sometime in March, go outside and find the red planet Mars in the night sky. Relax and try to focus all your attention on the tiny red sphere. Relax completely with an open and quiet mind. Become empty and let the planet influence you. Do this until you feel a real connection with the distant planet. Continue gazing upon Mars and place a piece of iron in your hand or a small cast iron pot or other object but not something of made of steel or chromed. You should be able to feel a resonance building. It is what alchemists refer to as the “call of iron.” You are experiencing the metal’s true signature or living correspondence with its planetary twin. See how your feelings compare to how the alchemists felt about this powerful metal.When mixed with solar herbs, iron herbs increase energy and activate the energetic potentials of other herbs. Martian elixirs release the action poten-tial of the soul of something. When mixed with other herbs, martian herbs acti-vate the potentialities of the other herbs to a great degree making them more forceful in applica-tion and generally more active. Mars herbs are wonderful tonics when mixed with Sun herbs. The combination gives great physical energy, tones the muscles, and increases sexual potency. They also provoke self-reliance, spontaneity, and indepen-dence of attitude. If the alchemist is involved in magical evocation, a mixture of a mars, moon, and mercurial elixirs will help produce the physical plane vehicle of manifestation.Copper is a reddish-brown metal with a bright metallic luster. It is in the same group in the Periodic Table as gold, and like gold, it is remarkably ductile. It is also very malleable and sectile (it can be pounded into other shapes and cut into slices) and is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. Molten copper is a sea green color, and copper tarnishes with a green color and burns with a blue-green flame with flashes of red, and the alchemists sometimes described Venus, the metal’s archetypal planetary source, as dressed in a blue cloak over a red gown.Pick up a piece of copper and the first thing you notice is its surprising feeling of warmth and moisture. It is that connection to something archetypal and nourishing that makes up the signature of this metal. It is easy to connect with copper, just as its planet (Venus) is easy to see in the sky. It is so brilliant it is often mistaken for a bright star or even a UFO. The best time to see it is in the early evening or morning when it is close to the horizon. In fact, Venus has been called both the “Morning Star” and the “Evening Star” and is associated with magical energies. It is the “first star I see tonight” upon you make you wish that will come true with the sympathetic venusian energies. On some clear night or morning, go outside and find the planet Venus. Relax and try to focus all your attention on the brilliant white sphere. Relax completely with an open and quiet mind. Become empty and let the planet influence you. Do this until you feel a real connection with the distant planet. Continue gazing upon the planet and grab a piece of copper, a fistful of pennies, or even a copper cooking utensil. You should be able to feel a warm resonance building. That deep and soothing vibration is not your imagination. It is what alchemists refer to as the “call of copper.” You are experiencing the metal’s true signature or living correspondence with its planetary twin.The venusian signature gives refinement of senses and the ability to appreciate beauty. Artists, actors, and others in the public eye will find these elixirs a great aid to performing their work. Venus herbs also enhance the taste perceptions, promote affection, give an amiable disposition, and make one more psychically sensitive to astral influences. For those who feel a lack of charm, or some of the softer human qualities, a venusian elixir will stimulate the right vibration in your aura. Venusian elixirs also promote harmony and balance within our being and in our dealings with others. Venusian elixirs are said to give access to that realm of the astral that is intimately connected with the working and forces of the most intimate magic of nature. They are a great aid to alchemists who wish to make herbal alchemy their life work, as they open up the human consciousness to the secrets of the plant kingdom. Naturalists will find these elixirs most illuminating, as they will give conscious con-tact with the various “deities” of long past nature religions.Mercury is truly unique. It is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature and the heaviest natural liquid on the planet. According to alchemical theory, all the metals began in the liquid state on deep in the earth, but only mercury was able to retain it original innocence and life force and resist taking on a final form, and for that reason, the ancients called it Mercurius vivens (the “living mercury”). This silvery liquid metal (also known as “Quicksilver”) was known to ancient Chinese and Hindus before 2000 BC and has been found in sacred tubes in Egyptian tombs dated from 1500 BC. It was first used to form alloys with other metals around 500 BC. The Greeks applied germ-killing ability of mercury in healing ointments (to the benefit of those afflicted with wounds and skin infections), and in the Middle Ages, Paracelsus used it successfully to treat syphilis. However, the ancient Romans applied mercury compounds for long-term use in cosmetics, and many beautiful women eventually died of its cumulative poisonous effects. Today, many popular brands of eye makeup still contain low levels of mercury.In the East, metallic mercury was the main ingredient in most Tantric medicinal preparations. In his travels through India, Marco Polo observed that many people drank a concoction of mercury and sulfur twice monthly from early childhood with no observable ill effects. They believed the drink gave them longevity. Tantric alchemists in India still take metallic mercury in place of food as an elixir of life, although they caution that the body must be perfectly attuned and strengthened to tolerate the intense cosmic infusion of life force. In Indian alchemy, mercury is called rasa, which refers to the subtle essence that is the origin of all forms of matter. The cosmic chaos from which the universe sprang is called the Rasasara or “Sea of Mercury.” The craft of alchemy is referred to as Rasayana or “Knowledge of Mercury.” Go outside on the night of the full moon and gaze up at the silver orb. Relax and try to focus all your attention on the surface of the moon. Relax completely with an open and quiet mind. Become empty and let our closest planetary body influence you. Do this until you feel a real connection. Now, pick up piece of silver jewelry or dinnerware, and hold it in your left hand until it gets warm. You should be able to feel a liquid-like sensation of cool metallic energy. This is what alchemists refer to as the “call of silver.” You are experiencing the metal’s true signature or living correspondence with the moon itself. Try to remember how this feels in your body. Has the taste in your mouth changed? Has your eyesight altered? How does your skin feel.The alchemists prepared an Oil of Silver they used to treat disorders of the brain and cerebellum, reduce stress, balance emotions, improve memory, treat nervous disorders and epilepsy, improve both melancholia and mania. It was also used as a physical purgative and mental purifier. It was said to affect the subconscious mind, see into the past clearly, remove fears and blockages, allow one to unwind, produce “homey” feelings, give a feeling of grace and sensitivity, and enhanced imagination.Using elaborate mixing and heating techniques, Egyptian alchemists tried making gold by changing the proportions of the Four Elements in the base metals or by attempting to speed up natural growth of lesser metals into gold. Around 100 AD, Egyptian alchemist Maria Prophetissa used mercury and sulfur to try to make gold. Around 300 AD, the alchemist Zosimos, whose recipes often came to him in dreams, was working to transmute copper. “The soul of copper,” he wrote must be purified until it receives the sheen of gold and turns into the royal metal of the Sun." A technique known as "diplosis" (“doubling”) of gold became popular. One such recipe called for heating a mixture of two parts gold with one part each of silver and copper. After appropriate alchemical charging that brought the seed of gold alive, twice as much of a gold as originally added was produced. Egyptian alchemists believed that the gold acted as a seed in metals, especially copper and silver. According to their view, the seed of gold grew, eating the copper and silver as food, until the whole mixture was transformed into pure gold.Gold is a stubbornly pure metal when it comes to reacting or even associating with “lesser” elements. That signature explains a lot of the chemical characteristics of gold. Unlike nearly every other metal, there are no plants that contain even trace amounts of metallic gold. There are very few gold ores, because the noblest metal never alloys with the baser metals, but does alloy with the noble metal silver and makes an amalgam with mercury.Gold is extremely ductile, malleable, and sectile, and so soft it can be cut with a knife, which makes gold impractical to use for tools. It is also very heavy. A gold bar is twice as heavy as an equal-sized bar of lead. Furthermore, gold embodies an inner equilibrium of forces that make it pretty much indestructible. Gold never tarnishes like copper or silver or rust like iron and, whether found buried in the ground, at the bottom of the ocean, in an ancient tomb, or in the ring on your finger, it always looks the same. It cannot be damaged by heat and was considered completely inalterable until around 1100 AD, when alchemists concocted a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids known as Agua Regia (“Royal Water”) that could dissolve gold. The immortal metal is endlessly recycled, and all the gold known today is very nearly equal to all the gold that has ever been mined. One ounce of gold can be stretched into a single wire 35 miles long, or it can be beaten to just a few atoms thick. It is the most flexible, enduring, and beautiful of all metals.

Gold shows a distinct affinity for sulfur and forms an ore with a rare element called tellurium. It is one of the few elements gold easily bonds with. In fact, telluride is rarely found without gold. Gold also appears in minerals that are part of a group of tellurium sulfides called the tellurides. However, the amount of gold in these minerals is really miniscule next to the amount of gold found in its native metallic state. Native gold seems to like the company of the purest white quartz and is also found mixed with deposits of pyrite and a few other sulfide minerals. Gold is six times rarer than silver, and it takes about three tons of gold ore to extract an ounce of gold metal.Around the world, nearly every culture associated their supreme god or goddess with gold. For many centuries only the images of gods graced gold coins, until Alexander the Great began the trend of rulers’ images appearing on gold coins around 30 BC. Even the most primitive societies recognize the sacred properties of gold. For example, the Makuna tribes of modern Brazil believe that gold contains “the light of the sun and stars." The chemical symbol for gold (Au) comes from the Latin word aurum meaning "gold.” The alchemical cipher for gold is a rendition of the sun (A), and gold was considered a kind of congealed light. Sol is the King of alchemy, and his royal purple-red color is revealed in gold colloidal solutions, and red is his symbolic color. Sol Philosophorum was the name the alchemists gave to this living spirit of gold, which they saw as the refined essence of heat and fire. Gold was known and considered sacred from earliest times. Gold became popular because it reminded people of the sun with its warm, life-giving properties. Because of its imperishability, the ancient Chinese thought that gold conveyed immortality to its owners. Egyptian inscriptions dating back to 2600 BC describe these same associations with gold. Gold replaced bartering around 3500 BC when the people of Mesopotamia started using it as a kind of money because of it eternal value. By 2800 BC, gold was being fashioned into standardized weights in the form of rings. People started carried black stones called “touchstones” onto which they scraped a piece of gold to leave a streak. Depending on the brightness of the streak, one could estimate how much gold was in the sample. Around 1500 BC, Mesopotamian alchemists discovered a process for purifying gold known as "cuppellation," which involved heating impure gold in a porcelain cup called a “cuppel.” Impurities were absorbed by the porcelain, leaving a button of pure gold behind. Later alchemists used cuppels to test the quality of their transmutations.Using elaborate mixing and heating techniques, Egyptian alchemists tried making gold by changing the proportions of the Four Elements in the base metals or by attempting to speed up natural growth of lesser metals into gold. Around 100 AD, Egyptian alchemist Maria Prophetissa used mercury and sulfur to try to make gold. Around 300 AD, the alchemist Zosimos, whose recipes often came to him in dreams, was working to transmute copper. “The soul of copper,” he wrote must be purified until it receives the sheen of gold and turns into the royal metal of the Sun." A technique known as "diplosis" (“doubling”) of gold became popular. One such recipe called for heating a mixture of two parts gold with one part each of silver and copper. After appropriate alchemical charging that brought the seed of gold alive, twice as much of a gold as originally added was produced. Egyptian alchemists believed that the gold acted as a seed in metals, especially copper and silver. According to their view, the seed of gold grew, eating the copper and silver as food, until the whole mixture was transformed into pure gold.According to the medieval alchemists, Nature sought continually to create the perfection achieved in gold, and they looked at every metal as gold in the making. Alchemists also thought that the objective of every metal was to become gold, and every metal was tested for corrosion and strength and ranked as to how far it was from gold. Many alchemists felt that mercury was the closest metal to gold and that it could be transmuted directly into gold. Their intuition was correct, for mercury can indeed be turned into gold. Gold and mercury are next to each other on the Periodic Table. Mercury is element 80 (has 80 protons) and gold is element 79 (has 79 protons). In the 1960s, physicists were able to knock out a proton in mercury atoms using neutron particle accelerators, and thereby create minute quantities of gold.Gold is at the head of the metals, paired with what in the medieval mind was the strongest planet, the Sun. The alchemists were obsessed with gold’s signature of perfection. Medieval Italian alchemist Bernard Trevisan speculated, "Is not gold merely the Sun’s beams condensed into a solid yellow?" Seventeenth-century alchemist John French asked fervently: “Is there no sperm in gold? Is it not possible to exalt it for multiplication? Is there no universal spirit in the world? Is it not possible to find that collected in One Thing which is dispersed in all things? What is that which makes gold incorruptible? What induced the philosophers to examine gold for the matter of their medicine? Was not all gold once living? Is there none of this living gold, the matter of philosophers, to be had anymore?”Gold is highly valued in the everyday world too. It is used as coinage and is a standard for monetary systems in many countries. It is used to make jewelry and artwork, and also in dentistry, electronics, and plating. Since it is an excellent reflector of infrared energy (such as emerges from the sun), the metal is used to coat space satellites and interstellar probes. Chlorauric acid is used in photography for toning the silver image. It is also used in medicine to treat degenerative diseases such as arthritis and cancer.Chemist Lilly Kolisko performed experiments with gold chloride and showed its chemical behavior coincided with events that altered the strength of the sun, such as the weakening in solar forces during solar eclipses or their increase during the summer solstice. Moreover, she found that both silver and gold salts seemed to be equally influenced by the sun. In the case of silver, it was the forms or patterns that changed, whereas in the gold, it was the colors that changed. Silver shapes moved from jagged spikes to smooth rolling forms but the colors remained hues of grey, while the basic shape of gold patterns remained the same but the colors changed from brilliant yellows through violet to reddish-purple hues. This work presents an amazing confirmation of how the King and Queen, Sol and Luna, work together in creation, with the female principle representing soul and form and the male principle representing spirit and energy. Kolisko’s innovative work with the metals is presented in the Appendix. Her work has been duplicated by dozens of other chemists and has been confirmed many times.The signatures of gold are invoked in rituals, magical spells, and talismans concerning solar deities, the male force, authority, self-confidence, creativity, financial riches, investments, fortune, hope, health, and worldly and magical power. Gold talismans can be very expensive, but you can make one of gold colored cardboard or write the symbols on it with gold paint or plate an object with gold. Gold jewelry is said to improve self-confidence and inner strength. To charge water with the signature of gold, put a gold object in a glass of water and let sit in the sunlight for 6-10 hours.During sunrise or sunset, face the sun and try to feel it archetypal presence. If not too bright, gaze into the rising or setting sun and try to see the metallic solar disk of which the Egyptian alchemists spoke. Relax and try to focus all your attention on the golden sphere. Relax completely with an open and quiet mind. Become empty and let the presence at the center of our solar system influence you. Do this until you feel a real connection with the distant sun. Continue facing the sun as you pick up a piece of gold jewelry or a vial of pure gold flakes (such as sold in some novelty shops) into your right palm. You should be able to feel a electric warmth building. That eerie, warm vibration is not your imagination. It is what alchemists refer to as the “call of gold” – the resonation of the metal with its “planet.” You are experiencing the metal’s true signature or living correspondence, and for gold, this is the most perfect expression of all materials. If you can connect with this archetype, you will realize that it a very personal as well as divine presence. As Above, so Below. This is perfection on all levels of your mind, body, and soul resonating with the perfection inherent in the Whole Universe.For those with weaker wills or loss of contact with the divine presence, gold represents a psychological cure. The solar essences gives great ambition, courage, self-re-liance, dignity, authority, and the ability to manage oneself and others. The creative principle, no matter how small and insignificant it is within us can be enhanced to a great degree by tapping into the solar archetype. Just as the Sun represents the di-vine creative force in our immediate solar system, gold represents the same thing in our inner temperament. For lasting manifestation, the golden temperament needs to be firmly grounded in the world, and the danger at this phase of transformation is that the individual become too focused on the workings Above and forget his or her connection to the real world. Gold and the blazing Sun correspond to personal ambition, courage, and creative energy and vitality, but without a constant effort to remain pure and alive in the real world, the golden temperament can quickly transmute into the leaden qualities of despair, poor self esteem, lack of confidence, and impurity. Most important for the golden temperament, however, is to realize that once having reached this plateau, one has certain personal and karmic obligations. The golden attitude of this temperament is what brings the rewards of health, wealth, and happiness through synchonistic responses from the universe. Go against these archetypal powers at this level of achievement and even the slightest deviation from the golden path of righteousness and personal integrity can have disastrous and immediate consequences. The alchemists transmuted the Gold temperament using the operation of Coagulation.Chrysotherapy is the name given to healing with gold. The mystical metal has been used for both spiritual and medical purposes as far back as ancient Egypt. Over 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians used gold in dentistry and ingested it for mental, bodily, and spiritual purification. The ancients believed that gold in the body worked by stimulating the life force and raising the level of vibration on all levels. In Alexandria, alchemists developed a powerful elixir known as “liquid gold,” which reportedly had the ability to restore youth and perfect health. In ancient Rome, gold salves were used for the treatment of skin ulcers, and today, gold leaf plays an important role in the treatment of chronic skin ulcers. The great alchemist and founder of modern medicine, Paracelsus, developed many highly successful medicines from metallic minerals including gold. In medieval Europe, gold-coated pills and “gold waters” were extremely popular. Alchemists mixed powdered gold into drinks to "comfort sore limbs," and today, it is widely used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. In the 1900s, surgeons implanted a $5.00 gold piece under the skin near an inflamed joint, such as a knee or elbow. In China, peasants still cook their rice with a gold coin in order to help replenish gold in their bodies, and fancy Chinese restaurants put 24-karat gold-leaf in their food preparations.The alchemists believed that gold represented the perfection of matter, and that its presence in the body would enliven, rejuvenate, and cure a multitude of “dis-eases.” Gold is never corrodes or even tarnishes, is completely non-toxic, and exhibits no interactions with other drugs. Gold is the only heavy metal that has a right-hand atomic spin and is therefore easily tolerated by the body.The alchemists believed that gold represented the perfection of matter, and that its presence in the body would enliven, rejuvenate, and cure a multitude of “dis-eases.” Gold is never corrodes or even tarnishes, is completely non-toxic, and exhibits no interactions with other drugs. Gold is the only heavy metal that has a right-hand atomic spin and is therefore easily tolerated by the body.Sun-ruled plants affect the soul in its positive phase of manifestation, which manifests on the personal level as our idea of ourselves as a progressive unified entity. Solar herbs help us realize our evolutionary epoch as an individual among many other individuals, helping to synthesize and synchronize our goals with those of the macrocosm. In this sense they are ego fortifiers, but with a divine purpose.Solar herbs heal inferiority complexes, bolstering people and giving them a sense of purpose beyond the norm. The Sun represents the Christ and Osiris consciousness in man, as well as Hercules in his monumental strength. For those with weaker wills, Sun ruled herbs will provide the springboard for more posi-tive action; they also bestow the quality of generosity to our souls. Solar plants, when alchemically charged, will reveal the divine purpose of our solar system, and will let you be-come aware of the will of God in manifestation. Solar essences give great ambition.

 

www.azothalchemy.org/metals.htm

  

Description in english below.

More photos on my page.

Plus de photos sur ma page.

 

Le super destroyer à l’arrière plan est la pour représenter le Poing d’Acier, le vaisseau Amiral de l’amiral Zsinj, et conçut par cereal eating builder lien vers sa création : www.flickr.com/photos/66888731@N04/49932727888/in/datepos...

 

Ce modèle de tie fut uniquement utilisé par les pilotes de l’Amiral Zsinj.

Parlons du gars. Si Timothy Zhan s’est inspiré de Sherlock Holmes pour le grand Amiral Zahn, je suspecte fortement l’auteur responsable de la création de Zsinj (Aaron Alston ?) de s’être inspiré d’Hercule Poirot. Petit, moustachu et ventripotent, adepte du ridicule pour être sous-estimé, et redoutablement intelligent et cultivé. Moi ça me fait furieusement penser à Hercule Poirot.

Bref, Zsinj a peut-être été responsable du design du Tie Raptor. Objectivement, c’est le design de Tie le plus logique que je connaisse. Mieux armé que le Tie classique (4 blasters, 2 lances missiles) il est plus rapide (entre le Tie classique et l’interceptor) et tout aussi maniable. Autre point fort du Raptor : La disposition et la taille de ses ailes, donnent un meilleur champ de vision au pilote, tout en offrant une cible plus petite à l’adversaire. De plus certains modèles furent équipés d’un boulier, mais pas d’Hyperdrive cependant.

 

Si la forme en x des ailes peut rappeler les X-wing, celles-ci ne sont cependant pas mobiles contrairement au X-wing.

 

Concernant le moc proprement dit. J’ai un peu galéré. Ce qui passe sur le logiciel studio, ne passe pas nécessairement irl. La boule centrale dut facile à faire, mais les ailes étaient trop en pression contre la courbure du cockpit, j’ai du modifier mes plan initiaux.

Question solidité : Pas terrible…

Cela tient en place, mais il ne faut pas trop remuer l’engin sous peine de voir les ailes se décrocher.

 

The Executor-class Star Dreadnought in the background is there to represent the Iron Fist, the flagship of Admiral Zsinj, and is designed by "cereal eating builder" link to its creation: www.flickr.com/photos/66888731@N04/49932727888/in/datepos...

 

This Tie only used by Admiral Zsinj's pilots.

Let's talk about the guy. If Timothy Zhan was inspired by Sherlock Holmes for the great Admiral Zahn, I strongly suspect that the author responsible for the creation of Zsinj (Aaron Alston?) was inspired by Hercule Poirot. Short, mustachioed and a little fat, adept at ridicule to be underestimated, and fearfully intelligent and cultured. It makes me furiously think of Hercule Poirot.

In short, Zsinj may have been responsible for the design of the Tie Raptor. Objectively, it's the most logical Tie design I know. Better armed than the classic Tie (4 blasters, 2 missiles launchers) it is faster (between the classic Tie and the interceptor) and just as easy to handle. Another strong point of the Raptor : The layout and the size of its wings, give a better field of vision to the pilot, while offering a smaller target to the opponent. In addition, some models were equipped with an shield, but no Hyperdrive however.

 

If the x-shape of the wings can remind the X-wing, they are not mobile unlike the X-wing.

 

Concerning the moc itself. I had a little trouble. What goes on the studio software, does not necessarily go well irl. The center ball was easy to make, but the wings were too much pressure against the cockpit curvature, I had to modify my initial plan.

Concerning the moc Solidity : Not so good...

This holds in place, but you shouldn't shake the gear too much or the wings will fall.

 

N.B. See my profile for usage guidelines and contact information.

Monsanto. Portugal. La solidez de la piedra. 7

"A super sports car soul and the functionality typical for an SUV: this is Lamborghini Urus, the world’s first Super Sport Utility Vehicle. Identifiable as an authentic Lamborghini with its unmistakable DNA, Urus is at the same time a groundbreaking car: the extreme proportions, the pure Lamborghini design and the outstanding performance make it absolutely unique. Urus’ distinctive silhouette with a dynamic flying coupé line shows its super sports origins, while its outstanding proportions convey strength, solidity and safety. Urus’ success factors are definitely the design, the driving dynamics and the performance. All these features allowed Lamborghini to launch a Super Sport Utility Vehicle remaining loyal to its DNA."

 

Source: Lamborghini

  

Photographed at Sharnbrook Hotel during Sharnbrook Supercar Sunday organized by PetrolHeadonism Club.

  

____________________________________________________

 

Marcin Wojciechowski Photography

 

Marcinek_55 Instagram

 

Here is my Grendizer (Goldrake/Goldorak)! Being a real legend in many countries, this guy truly deserves a proper treatment, so i've made the biggest creation i've ever made so far: 320 mm is a good help while recreating the typical curved surfaces of 80ies Super Robots, but it has been also a challenge, trying to reach a good compromise between aesthetic, solidity and poseability.

 

The IIIg was the last of the screw-mount Leicas. It was manufactured until 1960 in parallel to the much more expensive, and of course more modern bayonet-equipped M3 that many people see as the best Leica ever.

 

This particular body was manufactured in 1958. It has significantly more bulk than my pre-war IIIa, but the changes in handling are, at best, incremental. The larger finder is useful, and so are the parallax-corrected frames, but to me, the camera feels less "just right" than the 2 decades older model. But that is just my personal feeling.

 

Yes, of course she's complicated to use. Her design was obsolete even when she was new, But her build quality is beyond doubt and also, almost, beyond belief. Just go for a waltz with one of these ladies and you'll see what I mean.

 

That's just talking about the body. The lens ...quite frankly, I could never quite warm for the collapsibles. There is something missing there. The feeling of absolute, unflagging solidity. One thing is for sure, the glass is very easily scratched. Watch out for that if you consider buying an old Summicron. Always do the old flashlight test.

Howl

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

  

For Carl Solomon

 

I

 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

 

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

 

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

 

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

 

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

 

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

 

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

 

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

 

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

 

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

 

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

 

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

 

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

 

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

 

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

 

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

 

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

 

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

 

whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

 

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

 

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

 

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

 

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

 

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

 

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

 

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

 

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

 

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

 

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

 

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

 

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

 

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

 

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

 

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

 

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

 

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

 

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

 

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

 

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

 

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

 

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

 

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

 

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

 

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

 

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

 

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

 

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

 

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

 

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

 

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

 

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

 

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

 

who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

 

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

 

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

 

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

 

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

 

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

 

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

 

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

 

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

 

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

 

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

 

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

 

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

 

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

 

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

 

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

 

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

 

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

 

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

 

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

 

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

 

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

 

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

 

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

  

II

 

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

 

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

 

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

 

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

 

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

 

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

 

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

 

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

 

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

 

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

 

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

 

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

 

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

 

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

 

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

  

III

 

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you're madder than I am

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you must feel strange

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you imitate the shade of my mother

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you laugh at this invisible humour

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

 

I'm with you in Rockland

 

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

 

Newport Beach Pembrokeshire.

 

As kid I remember being hugely disappointed when I first discovered that waves hadn’t really travelled all the way over the ocean. In fact no water had travelled anywhere but it was just going up and down and back and forth in circles. It’s only the energy that travels... How unromantic can you get!

 

So these aren’t waves from America like I’d really like them to be. Realistically, at best, they are the energetic remnants of a windy squall in mid-Atlantic. Sorry. Poetry and imagination will resume later, but found somewhere else…

 

In spite of that disappointment waves still turn out to be interesting (speaking as a would-be physicist). Life depends on them; energy wouldn’t exist without them.

 

Even sea waves are interesting, especially when they hit the shore. When that happens the movement of water becomes chaotic, and water does move a lot further. It’s unmodelable in maths because there are too many unknown parameters and slight irregularities in flow cause unpredictable chaos. So when you look at a wave you are looking at the triumph of nature over mathematics. ‘Great!’ I hear you say (my vivid imagination runs away... :) ).

 

Not one of the best in the series of five so far and probably the last landscape from this set, but still fun to process. I liked the white frothy breakers against the dark solidity of the headland and the brooding sky, so that was the aim for tweaking this one.

 

For 7DWF Thursday: Black & White/Sepia.

 

Thank you for taking time to look. I hope you enjoy the image!

 

[Processed in LR for a full range of colour and light contrast for tonality (for feeding the B&W converter later).

Affinity Photo: Strong Haze filter to rescue the clouds from the British murk.

Converted in Nik Silver Efex with contrast and structure boost, and light sepia toning.

Back in AP sharpening with High Pass and Linear Light blend, masked to prevent haloes on the horizon and granulation of the sky; lightened shadows with Shadows/Highlights filter, selectively changed contrast with Curves in the Lightness channel of LAB; added a masked Gaussian Blur to counter some of the messy artefacts in the high contrast processing.

Finally fairly strong dark vignette, and flipped the whole piece horizontally because this was another of those curious shots that said something different when you did that :) ]

“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”

— James Joyce (Ulysses)

  

the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland. December 2017

 

more shots here:

andreatallone.tumblr.com/post/169350606746/cliffsofmoher

 

For the lover of old stones and anyone interested in their rich, multi-secular history, wonderful discoveries sometimes come under the most mundane appearances...

 

This is the Carolingian crypt of Saint-Andoche. It is not a place open to the public, as it is enclosed within the confines of a catholic teaching institution, but I managed to get access through my contacts. Even through the place is quite dirty and used as a repository for old school furniture and similar junk, the pillars and vaults from the 800s are splendid in their purity, lightness and immovable solidity. They have been standing and supporting the hundred of tons above since the 800s.

port de pollenca, draped in winter's subtle serenity, presents a scene of quiet harmony. the marina, a gallery of sails at rest, awaits the whisper of adventure. this grayscale tableau is a study of calm, where even the water seems to hold its breath, mirroring the world above in perfect symmetry. the mountains, guardians in the distance, rise softly against a sky of gentle gradients. the pier, lined with round fenders like a string of pearls, marks the boundary between the known and the beckoning sea. it’s a photograph of contrasts — the stillness of the boats against the latent power of the sea, the solidity of the pier reflected in the fluidity of the water. this moment is a silent ode to the contemplative beauty of winter by the sea, an invitation to stand still, to look closer, to listen to the hush.

Two works by Bruno Walpoth

 

In the XIX century, Jacob Burckhardt was calling Bellini’s altarpieces

Existenzbilder, “pictures of existence”, and the first thing that stands

out when looking at the works of Bruno Walpoth is their pure and

sufficient “existence”. However, this strong presence is wrapped and

isolated by empty spaces, detached from any context and without

any attributes that qualify its identity.

They are figures of the absolute, carved in lime, apple or walnut

wood, in which elegance and solidity are features with which the

sculptor measures the harmony between naturalism and invention.

The agreement is between “no motion” gestures and the absence of

manifest feelings. The eyes of the molded figures stare at a distant

point and rarely meet those of the spectator. Since the eyes are

detectors of emotions, if the contact with the other is almost denied,

the statues become distant, absorbed in their existence, swallowed

up by their thoughts.

This monumental fixity has ancient origins, it takes us back to the

Roman statuary, also paying homage to the fifteenth-century

tradition, especially the manner of Piero della Francesca. Likewise,

the humanity that Bruno Walpoth examines and creates, diversified

in poses, colors and patterns, always represents the same “ideal

greatness” of those who, corroded by doubt, oscillate between the

search for the good and the attraction towards evil.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratislava said: “The world makes two mistakes:

the first one consists in thinking that a great man can do no wrong,

and the second one is believing that when a great man makes a

mistake he ceases to be great.”

Walpoth instills in his sculptures this complacent awareness of being

caged in the dilemma preceding the right action to take and therefore

they do not perform any action. Nevertheless, the ability of the

sculptor in calibrating the synthesis of bodies and his attention to

detail lead the viewer to capture and essentially transcend the

physical and material aspects, and any expressiveness or limb

movement is no longer needed to determine its meaning.

The thin irregular touches of white enrich the wood tissue preventing

immobility of light on volumes, while the shades of the hair or little

clothing enliven the figures with visual and tactile values, but without

affecting the solemn guise or that sense of magic and silence that

embody the art of Bruno Walpoth, being its wonderful constant

  

PLUS

 

A work by Amber Sena

 

It is as if the work of Amber Sena wanted to resist the temptation

of indifference that often characterizes the contemporary forms,

and where the issue of proximity, of urgency as regards to

instances precisely related to the environment and to the human,

emerges as an edge of the modern. The work of Sena deals with

one of the capital issues of our time, and not only in the name of

defense of animals. The artist focuses on the traces of a sense

that perhaps can snatch us from such indifference, stating the

responsibility of art, once again called to participate in a present

we should take charge of.

Nightwatch, the Chased into the Dark series, Nightingale represent

the enigma, and a question not asking for an answer. The size of the

work implies that narrative impose itself, beyond artistic classification,

as an unavoidable need to think about what one does not want to

see. We are both attracted and repelled, we curiously approach, and

the work stands before us in the form of a vision questioning the

human and the subjectivity. First and last issue.

The story is therefore tripartite. South Africa, at nightfall the moaning

of a wounded rhinoceros breaks the silence of plains. The cub, near the

body of a dying mother, sees his destiny fulfilled and added to a tragic

statistic. As a solitary mountain in the moonlight, the silhouette of the

animal is witness to danger and extinction. The slaughtered head of

the rhinoceros cannot be thrown back without carrying the task of art

itself. As in the chorus of the ancient tragedy, the dull and demanding

roar of the animal vibrates, voice of that witness. In such voice, the

story of Amber Sena goes beyond the inhuman silence of death.

The notion of surface is also central in the work of the artist. On it,

the issues of time are engraved. The acrylic paint, polished, glazed,

vivid, protects the reflection of an opaque and detailed reality. Mirror

of depth, it is a film that has no thickness, but that only opens the

space of thought. And the Ark is not empty: in it, Sena’s maze of

cracks and scales, map of existences that risk being deleted, in the

hands of human will, slave of its own time, that acts according to the

sad logic of sale and commodity.

As regards the existence, never before it has been exposed to death

and destruction. Yet Sena’s accuracy and gestural density condense a

reflection about the indomitable proximity of the human to this dying

world. The animal, in fact, is a symbol of impotence, of inability to

communicate and insufficiency of words.

If originally the sense of community was based on sharing the

experience of the animal, sacrificed in the name of the higher

instance of the soul, now, today, the world seems to have given up

on such responsibility, insensitive in front of a complex and

problematic reality. For this reason, Sena’s space is an invitation to

approach, trail and hope for a more aware existence. That is what

we should answer for, to ourselves, to the others. And from such

trail we should start again

The sanctuary of Hippolytus at Troizena, directly connected with the mythical love of Phaedra for Hippolytus, lies in an idyllic environment about 170 kilometers away from Athens and in a short distance from Epidaurus. In spite of its significance, it remains unknown to the broad public. The enclosure and buildings of the sanctuary were erected outside the walls of ancient Troizena in the late fourth or early third century BC around an earlier nucleus of worship, which is located in the area of the small shrine of the Geometric period. Although the existence and function of an Asclepieion in the sanctuary is ascertained by relevant inscriptions, it seems that the celebrated Asclepieion of Epidaurus outshone it, therefore it remained rather obscure. The earthquake caused by the eruption of the Methana volcano in the mid-third century BC obviously contributed to the decline of the Troizena Asclepieion: its buildings suffered serious damages and remained in ruins until the Roman age, when they were restored. After the prevalence of Christianity the ancient building material was removed from the original structures and was used for the erection of Christian churches such as Episkopi. It should be noted that the removal and reuse of ancient building material has been continued until the recent decades. Some of the ancient monuments face today certain solidity and static problems due to the inherited weakness of the building material (limestone) and the reactive thrusts of the ground. The archaeological site remains undefined by enclosure, it lacks informational plates in front of the buildings and does not provide the necessary facilities for the few, for the time being, visitors.

30 second exposure, last light, Oregon beach.

Giotto's bell tower is one of the four principal monuments on the Piazza del Duomo.

 

84.7 metres tall and approximately 15 metres in breadth, it is the most eloquent example of 14th century Gothic architecture in Florence, combining a strong vertical thrust with the principle of sound solidity, its corner buttresses rising the full length of the tower to the projecting terrace at the top.

 

via www.museumflorence.com

 

Florence, Italy '13

  

- - - - - - - - -

twitter | website

 

The second and last of the "waterwall" photos taken at Beaverdam Park in Gloucester County, Virginia. The first waterwall is at www.flickr.com/photos/universalpops/5714786628/

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you use this photo on your website, you need to provide a link to this Flickr page.

  

aarhus town hall, aarhus, denmark, 1937-1942.

architects: arne jacobsen, 1902-1971, with erik møller, 1909-2002.

 

after having won the 1937 competition, jacobsen and møller were told to make the project more monumental or go home to copenhagen.

 

they added the grey marble cladding and a bell tower which remains one of the finest towers in denmark.

 

you can see how aware jacobsen was of developments in italian architecture at the time. like asplund, jacobsen found a special meaning in the work done to reconcile classicism and modernism in italy and it could be argued that it became the central theme of his career as an architect.

 

the use of natural stone - and in particular the grey marble from porsgrunn in norway - was to be another recurring feature. notice how jacobsen uses the stone to express solidity and weight in the core of the tower only to reveal the thinness of the marble cladding in the clock face.

 

this photo was uploaded with a CC license and may be used free of charge and in any way you see fit.

if possible, please name photographer "SEIER+SEIER". if not, don't.

 

more arne jacobsen

“Well, suppose we use our brains. We see things solid. Solidities are important to us in nature. In solidities, there are measures that greatly affect us. There are rhythms in the ins and outs of form. Music, the forest and to many the most impressive of arts deals in measures which seem to go in every direction. They combine, they move together, they deflect and they oppose. Music is a structure of highly mathematical measures. According to the selection and relative value of these measures the music is great or small in its effect on us.”

― Robert Henri

Vadim Zadorozhny’s Vehicle Museum, Moscow

 

Delahaye 175 was an automobile manufactured by Delahaye between 1947 and 1951. The last of the large Delahayes, the type 175 was essentially a 135 with a larger engine and more modern suspension,[1] with between 120 and 160 hp depending on compression and how many Solex carburettors were fitted. The front end design was by Delahaye's young head designer Philippe Charbonneaux, and marked an effort to develop a particular Delahaye "face". Delahaye required coachbuilders to use the corporate front-end, although famous ones such as Figoni et Falaschi were given a certain amount of leeway. The 4.5-litre engine used in these cars carried the "183" model code.

fter having spent World War II building train cars for the German occupiers, Delahaye was included in deputy director Paul-Marie Pons' 1945 plan Pons for French industry and engineering. His plan Pons was a five-year program for the recreation of French industry, allotting Delahaye the position of building covetable sports and luxury cars intended to raise much-needed foreign currency. The 134, 135, and 148 were revived, but Delahaye still needed a "halo car" like the 165. In consideration of the lower quality materials available in the immediate post-war era, the elaborate 4.5-litre V12 engine of the prewar 145[2] was replaced by a new, less complex six-cylinder engine of the same displacement.[3] The new 175 was one of a very few debuts at the Paris Salon in October 1946, and therefore garnered considerable attention. It would also be Delahaye's first left-hand drive model.[4]

 

The car, however, was not fully developed yet: while shown again in 1947, production did not truly begin until 1948, and some say that it was never fully developed. However, as most of the French grandes marques no longer existed, coach builders all descended upon the 175 to prove their art.

No more than 51 Type 175s were built.[1][6] While not a grand success in the marketplace, a Type 175S won the 1951 Monte Carlo Rally[7] and had a strong showing at the 1950 Carrera Panamericana.[8] The 175 was available with twin carburettors and a 295 cm wheelbase; two longer wheelbase versions with single carburettors and 125 hp were also built: The types 178 (315 cm, 37 built)[3] and 180 (333.5 cm). Only seventeen Type 180s were produced, mainly for heads of state and the like. Two Henri Chapron-bodied, fully armoured 180 limousines with divisions were built for the leadership of the French Communist Party in 1948.[1] A prototype "Delage D180" was also developed on this basis, but never entered production as Delage instead focused on their D6 model.[8] The total produced of the series is 105, although some sources claim only just under a hundred were built.

 

The type 183 engines with single carburettors produced from 120 to 140 hp depending on compression, allowing for top speeds of 130 (type 180), 140 (type 178) and 145 (type 175) km/h. The triple-carbed versions available in the 175 and 175S raised this to about 160 km/h (99 mph), although naturally these figures were subject to variation depending on which bodywork was fitted.

 

While still rear-wheel drive, the 175 chassis is considerably more sophisticated than its 135 predecessor, the front suspension being independent with Dubonnet struts. The rear was by de Dion, with semi-elliptical springs. Brakes were hydraulically operated drums all around.[8]

 

The custom bodies placed on these cars were often too heavy for the chassis, leading to collapsing Dubonnet suspensions and shearing rear transmission half-shafts. Wet-weather handling was considered unpredictable. A shortage of time and money for development may have been a cause of the 175's failure.[3] Delahaye's reputation for solidity took a serious hit in consequence, and although Delahaye managed to introduce the more modern 235 in 1951, the company did not survive much longer.[9] Delahaye and Delage combined production dropped from 511 in 1949 to 41 in 1952 and 36 in 1953.

ManufacturerDelahaye

Production1948–1951

ClassLuxury car

LayoutFR layout

Engine4,455 cc type 183 I6

Transmission4-speed pre-selector (Cotal)

RelatedDelahaye 135

 

TЕХНИЧЕСКИЕ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ

ПРОИЗВОДИТЕЛЬ: Delahaуe

СТРАНА:Франция

ВИД И ТИП:Легковой Кабриолет

ГОД ВЫПУСКА:1948

ВСЕГО ВЫПУЩЕНО:51

ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ДВИГАТЕЛЯ:6 цилиндров

МАКСИМАЛЬНАЯ СКОРОСТЬ:160 км./ч

.ГАБАРИТЫ:4800 (длина) мм

СНАРЯЖЕННАЯ МАССА:2,080 тонн

КОЛЕСНАЯ БАЗА:2950 мм

ОБЪЕМ ДВИГАТЕЛЯ:4455 см3

МОЩНОСТЬ ДВИГАТЕЛЯ:150 л.с.

Первый показ автомобиля этой модели на Парижском автосалоне 1946 года произвел сенсацию. Дорогой, комфортабельный кабриолет с экстравагантным дизайном явно не предназначался французской публике, а был разработан с расчетом на экспорт за океан. Но и там его дебют не был удачным.

 

ИСТОРИЯ МОДЕЛИ

 

Компания Delahaye представила свою первую послевоенную модель на Парижском автосалоне в 1946 году. В отличие от большинства автопроизводителей, показавших слегка модернизированные довоенные модели или новые, но простые по конструкции и дешевые (что и требовало обнищавшее европейское население), компания Delahaye поразила всех, представив роскошный и дорогой седан с оригинальным по дизайну кузовом, впоследствии оказавшим большое влияние на работы художников - конструкторов из разных стран. Выпуск автомобиля начался в 1948 году. Рамное шасси с 6-цилиндровым, 4,4-литровым двигателем, разработанным на основе старого, 3,6-литрового, было дополнено кузовом французского кузовного ателье Figoni & Falaschi и отличалось применением новой пружинной независимой передней подвески типа , а также использованием подвески задних колес типа . Тормоза получили гидропривод, а в салоне были установлены отопитель и радиоприемник. Предлагались варианты как с лево-, так и с правосторонним рулевым управлением. Автомобиль планировали экспортировать в страны, не пострадавшие от Второй Мировой войны, но эта цель так и не была достигнута. Всего за 4 года (1948 - 1951 г.г.) собрали не более 150 автомобилей, а с кузовом кабриолет был выпущен всего 51 экземпляр.

 

ТЕХНИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ

 

Практически каждый из выпущенных экземпляров имел оригинальный открытый или закрытый, стальной или алюминиевый кузов, изготовленный фирмами Henry Chapron, Guillore, Figoni & Falaschi, Saoutchik и др. Двигатель с 7-опорным коленчатым валом представлял собой мотор 135 модели с увеличенными диаметрами цилиндров. По желанию покупателя он поставлялся в двух исполнениях: с мощностью 125 и 140 л.с. Коробка передач Cotal с электромагнитным переключением ступеней в планетарном механизме существенно облегчала работу водителя. Подвеска обеспечивала высокую плавность хода, при этом в качестве упругих элементов спереди применялись винтовые пружины. Сзади у зависимой подвески типа (при жестком закреплении к кузову картера главной передачи) упругими элементами служили две полуэллиптические рессоры. Качающиеся полуоси в подобной конструкции проходили через отверстия в лонжеронах рамы.

Even if I'm sure this flower was enough of a reason to take a photo of it, it might be a great idea to verify the solidity of rock before stepping on it. The perfect picture necessarily requires to have the right focus in order not to have a blur image, but at least look out and stay focus for those around you.

  

My entry for The Rogue Olympics, Round 8, where the theme was « Focus ». The moc contains exactly 101 bricks, and it was pain not the go over that number and unfortunaltly, I had to use none-Lego support like tap or box.

 

As an inspiration, if you can still call it inspiration, because it's very similar to what I built, the comic picture (Don't mention the author of the Pinterest picture because I don't think the person made it really and unfortunatly, I can find the real author, at least I can say the person signes as "Fernandez")

  

Of course the duck is present, he's just flying above, and it's absolutly not because he's not here x)

 

This conspicuous black building with a gilded crown is one of the Raymond Hood's New York masterpieces.The architects combined Gothic and modern styles in the design of the building. Black brick on the frontage of the building (symbolizing coal) was selected to give an idea of solidity and to give the building a solid mass. Other parts of the facade were covered in gold bricks (symbolizing fire), and the entry was decorated with marble and black mirrors. Once again, the talents of Rene Paul Chambellan were employed by Hood and Howells for the ornamentation and sculptures.

February 23, 2013: Ai Weiwei: According to What? Exhibition at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. [IMG_5716-S95]

 

Information plaque reads:

------------------------------------------------

Ai Weiwi

Chinese, b. Beijing, 1957-

 

Cube Light

2008

 

Glass crystals, lights, and metal

 

Joseph H. Hirshhorm Bequest and Purchase Funds, 2012 (12.12)

 

Begun in 2002, Ai’s celebrated chandelier series includes large-scale installations composed of thousands of glass crystals. Cube Light, a seminal piece in this body of work, extends Ai’s interest in re-examining Minimalist artistic strategies and, more specifically, in questioning perceived solidity and exactitude of the iconic cube. The manipulation of materials that interrogate conventions of culture, history, politics, and tradition. According to Ai, an important inspiration for the series was a scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1928 film October, in which the shaking crystal chandelier suggests instability of a society undergoing profound change.

------------------------------------------------

"What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

  

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its

capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances

including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow

erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs

and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric

instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at

Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

  

Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?"

  

'Ulysses', Chapter: 'Ithaca', P.624 (1922 Text), James Joyce

This is also a (potentially) philosophical picture...

 

- Shades of Secondary Qualities -

The colours ascend the stairs, which appear to be painted in shades of blue, red and yellow. But this is a mere illusion: the stairs do not have the property they seem to have. Reflection is the source of the illusion: the prismatic shades are produced by the sunlight filtering through the stained glass windows of St. Denis’ Basilica. What if reflection revealed a generalised phenomenon? What if colours did not really exist? Colours have been considered secondary qualities, that is, properties that do not exist in the things themselves, but are merely subjective and cannot be accurately measured (different accounts can be found in, e.g., Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Hume). Secondary qualities have been contrasted with primary qualities, such as solidity and extension. This contrast is captured by the image. The hardness of the stone and its shape contrast with the ephemerality of the colours: it suffices a cloud or a change in perspective to destroy the latter, but not the former.

The foundations of the former Lady Chapel, the easternmost part of the church demolished at the Dissolution, are now laid out in the grass of the Abbey Gardens. Its dimensions can also be gauged from the line of its former vaulted ceiling (still with three weathered bosses) embedded in the east wall.

 

The attractive town of Tewkesbury has been dominated by its superb abbey church since the beginning of the 12th century, and we can be forever grateful to its townspeople for purchasing the monastic church in 1540 for £453 for use as their parish church, saving it from the fate that befell countless similar great churches across the land during the turmoil of the Dissolution. It reminds us both how lucky we are to still marvel at it today, yet also how great a loss to our heritage the period wrought when many more such buildings were so utterly plundered as to have gone without trace (the fate of the monastic buildings here and even the lady chapel of the church whose footings are laid out in the grass at the east end).

 

Tewkesbury Abbey is thus rightly celebrated as one of our greatest non-cathedral churches, and remarkably much of the original Norman church remains substantially intact, most apparently in the great central tower, a fine example of Romanesque architecture adorned with rows of blind-arcading. The west front is dominated by a massive Norman-arched recess (enclosing the somewhat later west window) and the nave and transepts remain largely as originally built, though this is less clear externally owing to the changes made to the windows, nearly all of which were enlarged in the 14th century in the Decorated Gothic style. This century also saw the complete rebuilding of the eastern limb of the church, of a form less common in England with radiating chapels surrounding the eastern apse of the choir (the central lady chapel sadly missing since 1540).

 

The interior reveals far more of the Romanesque structure with mighty columns supporting the round Norman arches of the nave arcades giving the building a great sense of solidity. The space is further enlivened by the changes made during the 14th century by the stunning vault over the nave (adorned with a rewarding series of figurative bosses) which sits surprisingly well with the Norman work below. Beyond the apsidal choir beckons, and both this and the space below the tower are enriched with stunningly complex vaulted ceilings (replete with further bosses and gilded metal stars), all ablaze with colour and gilding.

 

There is much to enjoy in glass here, most remarkably a complete set of 14th century glazing in the clerestorey of the choir, seven windows filled with saints and prophets (and most memorably two groups of knights in the westernmost windows on each side). A few of the figures have fared less well over the centuries but on the whole this is a wonderfully rare and well preserved scheme. There is much glass from the 19th century too, with an extensive scheme in the nave of good quality work by Hardman's, and more recently a pair of rich windows by Tom Denny were added in one of the polygonal chapels around the east end.

 

Some of the most memorable features are the monuments with many medieval tombs of note, primarily the effigies and chantry chapels of members of the Despenser family around the choir (two of the chantries being miniature architectural gems in their own right with exquisite fan-vaulting). In one of the apsidal chapels is the unusual cenotaph to Abbot Wakeman with his grisly cadaver effigy, a late medieval reminder of earthly mortality.

 

Tewkesbury Abbey is not to be missed and is every bit as rewarding as many of our cathedrals (superior in fact to all but the best). It is normally kept open and welcoming to visitors on a daily basis. I have also had the privilege of working on this great building several times over the years (as part of the team at the studio I once worked for), and have left my mark in glass in a few discreet places.

www.tewkesburyabbey.org.uk/

Monsanto. Portugal.El pueblo yen primer término el cementerio. La solidez de la piedra. 8

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is a navigable aqueduct that carries the Llangollen Canal across the River Dee in the Vale of Llangollen in north east Wales. The 18-arched stone and cast iron structure is for use by narrowboats and was completed in 1805 having taken ten years to design and build. It is the longest aqueduct in Great Britain and the highest canal aqueduct in the world.

 

The aqueduct was to have been a key part of the central section of the proposed Ellesmere Canal, an industrial waterway that would have created a commercial link between the River Severn at Shrewsbury and the Port of Liverpool on the River Mersey. Although a less expensive construction course was surveyed further to the east, the westerly high-ground route across the Vale of Llangollen was preferred because it would have taken the canal through the mineral-rich coalfields of North East Wales. Only parts of the canal route were completed because the expected revenues required to complete the entire project were never generated. Most major work ceased after the completion of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in 1805.

 

The structure is a Grade I listed building and a World Heritage Site.

 

There is a mighty scary drop on the Western side of this Aqueduct where there is no railing, so from that side of the boat you look straight down to the river and valley below.

 

History:

The aqueduct viewed from the valley below

The aqueduct was designed by civil engineers Thomas Telford and William Jessop for a location near an 18th-century road crossing, Pont Cysyllte. After the westerly high-ground route was approved, the original plan was to create a series of locks down both sides of the valley to an embankment that would carry the Ellesmere Canal over the River Dee. After Telford was hired the plan was changed to an aqueduct that would create an uninterrupted waterway straight across the valley. Despite considerable public scepticism, Telford was confident his construction method would work because he had previously built a cast-iron trough aqueduct – the Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct on the Shrewsbury Canal.

 

The aqueduct was one of the first major feats of civil engineering undertaken by Telford, who was becoming one of Britain's leading industrial civil engineers; although his work was supervised by Jessop, the more experienced canal engineer. Ironwork was supplied by William Hazledine from his foundries at Shrewsbury and nearby Cefn Mawr. The work, which took around ten years from design to construction, cost around of £47,000. Adjusted for inflation this is equivalent to no more than £3,840,000 in 2019, but represented a major investment against the contemporary GDP of some £400 million.

 

The Pontcysyllte aqueduct officially opened to traffic on 26 November 1805. A plaque commemorating its inauguration reads:

 

The nobility and gentry, the adjacent Counties having united their efforts with the great commercial interests of this country. In creating an intercourse and union between England and North Wales by a navigable communication of the three Rivers, Severne [sic] Dee and Mersey for the mutual benefit of agriculture and trades, caused the first stone of this aqueduct of Pontcysyllty [sic], to be laid on the 25th day of July MDCCXCV [1795]. When Richard Myddelton of Chirk, Esq, M.P. one of the original patrons of the Ellesmere Canal was Lord of this manor, and in the reign of our Sovereign George the Third. When the equity of the laws, and the security of property, promoted the general welfare of the nation. While the arts and sciences flourished by his patronage and the conduct of civil life was improved by his example.

 

The bridge is 336 yd (307 m) long, 12 ft (3.7 m) wide and 5 ft 3 in (1.60 m) deep. It consists of a cast iron trough supported 126 ft (38 m) above the river on iron arched ribs carried on eighteen hollow masonry piers (pillars). Each of the 18 spans is 53 ft (16 m) wide. With the completion of the aqueduct, the next phase of the canal should have been the continuation of the line to Moss Valley, Wrexham where Telford had constructed a feeder reservoir lake in 1796. This would provide the water for the length of canal between Trevor Basin and Chester. The plan to build this section was cancelled in 1798, and the isolated feeder and a stretch of navigation between Ffrwd and a basin in Summerhill was abandoned. Remnants of the feeder channel are visible in Gwersyllt. A street in the village is still named Heol Camlas (Welsh: Canal Way).

 

With the project incomplete, Trevor Basin just over the Pontcysyllte aqueduct would become the canal's northern terminus. In 1808 a feeder channel to bring water from the River Dee near Llangollen was completed. In order to maintain a continual supply, Telford built an artificial weir known as the Horseshoe Falls near Llantysilio to maintain water height.

 

Subsequently, the Plas Kynaston Canal was built to serve industry in the Cefn Mawr and Rhosymedre areas in the 1820s. There might have been another canal extension ("Ward's") but detailed records do not survive. Goods traffic was brought down to the canal by the Ruabon Brook Tramway which climbed towards Acrefair and Plas Bennion. This railway was eventually upgraded to steam operation and extended towards Rhosllannerchrugog and Wrexham.

 

In 1844, the Ellesmere and Chester Canal Company, which owned the broad canals from Ellesmere Port to Chester and from Chester to Nantwich, with a branch to Middlewich, began discussions with the narrow Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal, which ran from Nantwich to Autherley, where it joined the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. The two companies had always worked together, in a bid to maintain their profits against competition from the railways, and amalgamation seemed to be a logical step. An agreement was worked out by August, and the two companies then sought a Private Act of Parliament to authorise the takeover. This was granted on 8 May 1845, when the larger Ellesmere and Chester Canal Company was formed.

 

Plaque commemorating the construction of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct between 1795 and 1805 by Thomas Telford

In 1846, the canal and the aqueduct became part of the Shropshire Union Railways and Canal Company. But the intent of the merger was to build railways at a reduced cost, by using the existing routes of the canals they owned. By 1849, the plan to turn canals into railways had been dropped. As the aqueduct was largely in an area that was served by railways owned by the Great Western Railway, the LNWR was more than happy for the canal to remain open as long as it remained profitable. With the start of the First World War in 1914, the Shropshire Union – which the Pontcysyllte aqueduct was a part – served the war effort with its fleet of more than 450 narrow boats.

 

Commercial traffic on the canal greatly declined after a waterway breach near Newtown, Powys (now part of the Montgomery Canal) in 1936. By 1939 boat movements across the aqueduct to Llangollen had ceased. The canal was formally closed to navigation under the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company Act of 1944. On 6 September 1945, due to inadequate maintenance, the canal breached its banks east of Llangollen near Sun Bank Halt. The flow of hundreds of tons of water washed away the embankment of the railway further down the hill, tearing a 40-yard (37 m) crater 50 feet (15 m) deep. This caused the first traffic of the morning, a mail and goods train composed of 16 carriages and two vans, to crash into the breach, killing one and injuring two engine crew.

 

The aqueduct was saved (despite its official closure to waterway traffic) because it was still required as a water feeder for the remainder of the Shropshire Union Canal. The aqueduct also supplied drinking water to a reservoir at Hurleston. In 1955 the Mid & South East Cheshire Water Board agreed to maintain the canal securing its future.

 

In the latter half of the 20th century, leisure boating traffic began to rise. In a re-branding exercise by British Waterways in the 1980s, the former industrial waterway was renamed the Llangollen Canal. It has since become one of the most popular canals for holidaymakers in Britain because of its aqueducts and scenery. The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is now maintained and managed by the Canal & River Trust. Otters have been seen in the area.

 

Construction and maintenance:

Thomas Telford designed and built the Pontcysyllte aqueduct using the experience he gained from building Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct on the Shrewsbury Canal

The mortar used lime, water and ox blood. Blood and extracts of blood containing haemoglobin have been used in the construction and building industry since antiquity as air entraining colloids to inexpensively strengthen mortar exposed to freeze-thaw temperature cycles.

 

The iron castings for the trough were produced at the nearby Plas Kynaston Foundry, Cefn Mawr, which was built by the Shrewsbury ironfounder and millwright William Hazledine in the hope of gaining the contract. The rib castings may have been made at Hazledine's original works at Coleham, near Shrewsbury. The trough was made from flanged plates of cast iron, bolted together, with the joints bedded with Welsh flannel and a mixture of white lead and iron particles from boring waste. After 25 years the white lead was replaced with ordinary tar. As with Telford's Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct, the plates are not rectangular but shaped as voussoirs, similar to those of a stone arch. There is no structural significance to their shape: it is a decorative feature only, following the lines of the stiffening plates (see below) in the castings beneath.

 

In nearby Cefn Mawr a high quartz content sandstone was discovered at the location where the New Cefn Druids football stadium has since been built. Known locally as 'The Rock', the sandstone was extracted and worked here into the many numerous shapes as required by the architects. Many remnants of the workings are still visible alongside Rock Road which links Rhosymedre to Plas Madoc.

 

The supporting arches, four for each span, are in the form of cast-iron ribs, each cast as three voussoirs with external arches cast with an un-pierced web to give greater strength, at the cost of extra weight. Using cast iron in this way, in the same manner as the stone arch it supersedes, makes use of the material's strength in compression. They also give an impression of greater solidity than would be the case were the webs pierced. This impression is enhanced by the arrangement of strips of thicker stiffening incorporated into the castings, arranged in the manner of joints between voussoirs.

 

Cast plates are laid transversely to form the bed of the canal trough. The trough is not fastened to the arches, but lugs are cast into the plates to fit over the rib arches to prevent movement. The aqueduct was left for six months with water inside to check that it was watertight. A feature of a canal aqueduct, in contrast with a road or railway viaduct, is that the vertical loading stresses are virtually constant. According to Archimedes' principle, the mass (weight) of a boat and its cargo on the bridge pushes an equal mass of water off the bridge.

 

The towpath is mounted above the water, with the inner edge carried on cast-iron pillars in the trough. This arrangement allows the water displaced by the passage of a narrow boat to flow easily under the towpath and around the boat, enabling relatively free passage. Pedestrians, and the horses once used for towing, are protected from falling from the aqueduct by railings on the outside edge of the towpath, but the holes in the top flange of the other side of the trough, capable of mounting railings, were never used. The trough sides rise only about 6 inches (15 cm) above the water level, less than the depth of freeboard of an empty narrow boat, so the helmsman of the boat has no visual protection from the impression of being at the edge of an abyss. The trough of the Cosgrove aqueduct has a similar structure, although it rests on trestles rather than iron arches. It is also less impressively high.

 

Every five years the ends of the aqueduct are closed and a plug in one of the highest spans is opened to drain the canal water into the River Dee below, to allow inspection and maintenance of the trough.

 

World Heritage Site

The aqueduct and surrounding lands were submitted to the "tentative list" of properties being considered for UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1999. The aqueduct was suggested as a contender in 2005—its 200th anniversary year and it was formally announced in 2006 that a larger proposal, covering a section of the canal from the aqueduct to Horseshoe Falls would be the United Kingdom's 2008 nomination.

 

The length of canal from Rhoswiel, Shropshire, to the Horseshoe Falls, including the main Pontcysyllte Aqueduct structure as well as the older Chirk Aqueduct, were visited by assessors from UNESCO during October 2008, to analyse and confirm the site management and authenticity. The aqueduct was inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List on 27 June 2009.

With all my ❤️ I thank you for your ⭐ or 💬 or just for 👀 it.

A 📷 taken by me + Photmatix HDR + Photoshop oil + ps

IT'S NOT AI 📀

You can look at the Exif data on your right.➡️

 

Today I bring you an image that captures the beauty and magic of a special night: a night with a full moon reflected in the sea, with rocks as silent witnesses and flares of light that add a touch of mystery and charm. Join me as we explore this fascinating scene and let ourselves be carried away by its unique atmosphere.

In this image, we can see a night scene painted with the orange tones that the moonlight produces shortly after sunset. In the center, the full moon shines in all its splendor, reflecting in the calm waters of the sea. The rocks, located on the shore, add an element of solidity and firmness to the composition, while the gentle waves caress its bases.

Watch as flashes of light, known as flares, emerge from the moon and disperse over the surface of the water, creating a dazzling and magical effect. Each sparkle seems to be a small star that has fallen from the sky to dance in the sea.

This image invites us to immerse ourselves in the tranquility of the night, to contemplate the majesty of the universe and to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. The combination of the bright moon, the serene sea and the silent rocks creates an atmosphere of peace and wonder that transports us to another world.

In short, this image reminds us of the infinite beauty that surrounds us and the importance of stopping from time to time to appreciate it. On a night like this, where the moon and the sea merge in an embrace of light and shadow, we can find inspiration, calm and a connection with the divine.

 

With all my ❤️ I thank you for your ⭐ or 💬 or just for 👀 it.

A 📷 taken by me + Camera Raw +ps

THIS PHOTO IT'S NOT AI 📀

You can look at the Exif data on your right.➡️ in pc, and on phone below the comments 👇

 

This image is born from reality, from the solidity of stone and the light that surrounds it. The Venus of the Hill, a sculpture by Subirats, stands imposingly at the entrance of the neighborhood where I live. Its creator, the same artist who left his mark on the Passion Façade of the Sagrada Familia, sculpted a timeless force and elegance into this piece.

 

Although digital processes have been applied to this image, its essence remains unchanged: a serene, almost mystical presence that solemnly watches over the horizon. The editing merely seeks to enhance its majesty, playing with light and color to accentuate its dialogue with the surroundings.

 

The Venus of the Hill is not just a work of art; it is a stone guardian, blending with nature and time itself.

With all my ❤️ I thank you for your ⭐ or 💬 or just for 👀 it.

A two 📷 taken by me + Photoshop oil soft

IT'S NOT AI 📀

You can look at the Exif data on your right.➡️

 

In the natural theater of the rugged coast, a poignant scene unfolds before the eyes of those who gaze upon this photograph. At the center of the composition, like a hidden treasure revealed by the sunlight, a crevice in the rocks becomes the stage for an unexpected spectacle.

From that crevice emerges a gift from nature: a cluster of wild violet flowers. Their presence, as delicate as it is surprising, breaks the monotony of the bare stone, injecting the landscape with a touch of vitality and color. It's as if the earth itself, in its hardness and solidity, has allowed life to sprout from its depths, like a whisper of hope amidst the ruggedness.

The flowers, with their undulating petals and vibrant hues, contrast magnificently with the grayness of the rocks, creating a visual harmony that captivates the soul. Their apparent fragility becomes a symbol of resilience and beauty in an environment that might be considered inhospitable.

This image invites reflection on the wonder of nature and its ability to flourish even in the most unlikely of places. It's a reminder that life always finds a way to manifest itself, to seek out light and beauty, even among the narrowest crevices and most imposing obstacles. In every detail of this scene, there is a story of perseverance, wonder, and admiration for the miracle of existence.

 

Chassis n° V8C0L15040

 

Zoute Sale - Bonhams

Estimated : € 150.000 - 200.000

Sold for € 166.750

 

Zoute Grand Prix 2021

Knokke - Zoute

België - Belgium

October 2021

 

Aston Martin had always intended the DBS to house its new V8 engine, but production difficulties meant that the car first appeared with the DB6's 4.0-liter six. Bigger and more luxuriously appointed than the DB6, the heavyweight DBS disappointed some by virtue of its slightly reduced performance, but there were no complaints when the V8 finally arrived in 1969. With an estimated 315bhp available from its 5,340cc four-cam engine, the DBS V8 could reach 160km/h in under 14 seconds, running on to a top speed of 250km/h, a staggering performance in those days and one which fully justified the claim that it was the fastest production car in the world. After Aston Martin's acquisition by Company Developments in 1972, production resumed with the Series 2, now known as the Aston Martin V8 and distinguishable by a restyled front end recalling the looks of earlier Astons. The most successful Aston Martin ever, the V8 survived the changes of ownership and financial upheavals of the 1970s, enjoying a record-breaking production run lasting from 1969 to 1988, with 2,919 cars sold.

 

Described by former Aston Martin Chairman Victor Gauntlett as 'a stylish thoroughbred, beautifully built, luxurious, fast and immensely safe,' the V8 was built in several variants, one of the most exclusive being the Volante Convertible. Introduced in response to customer demand for such a car, the Volante first appeared in June 1978. Arguably the ultimate in soft-top luxury, the newcomer boasted a lined, power-operated top which, when erected, endowed the walnut embellished interior with all the solidity and refinement associated with the saloon version. Although its open-car aerodynamics meant that top speed suffered with the top down, the Volante's 240km/h maximum nevertheless ranked it among the world's fastest convertibles. V8 Volante and Vantage Volante chassis numbers ran from '15001' to '15849', a total of 849 cars.

  

The motorcar offered :

 

According to copies of Aston Martin's factory build records, this elegant V8 Volante was hand built at Aston Martin's Newport Pagnell plant during the fall of 1978 and is titled as 1979. The car received the final inspections in January 1979, and then shipped from the UK to its destination, the US. The car was equipped with left-hand-drive steering and the desirable 5-speed manual transmission. It was finished in Cambridge Blue over a Natural coloured leather interior, Onslow brown carpeting, just as it appears today. It was the 40th V8 Volante built and as such an early example it received the elegant chrome bumpers, neatly fitted tightly to the Volante body. It is believed that only a maximum of 10 of these 40 early cars were fitted with the desirable manual transmission.

 

The car's first owner was a FedEx executive and from the 1990s until 2016 the car was retained by Aston Martin enthusiast Mr. Jack Miller of Pittsburg, PA, who would display the beautiful V8 Volante at various Aston Martin gatherings. The car's extensive history and maintenance file includes much service work performed during Mr. Miller's ownership, including the installment of a new exhaust by renowned Aston Martin shop Steel Wings and a rebuilt braking system.

 

Today this well restored Aston Martin on a highly original basis shows less than 25,000 miles on the odometer, a figure that is indeed believed to be original and can be traced in the history file. Acquired by the vendor in 2017 the car was imported to Europe where restoration work for a total of approximately CHF100,000 was carried out on mechanicals, the body and paint, new trim and was recently fitted with a new convertible top in dark blue, with the work done to exacting factory standards. A solid and very well cared for car, close inspection of the V8 reveals many original finishes throughout. Complete with jack and tools, an owner's handbook with an original warranty booklet and a history file containing correspondence with Aston Martin and copies of the factory build records, this fine V8 Volante must be considered well-pedigreed. The car is EU duty paid and comes with its US title and EU duty paid import certificate. Bonhams recommends close inspection of this fine example of a true drophead V8 'British Bulldog'.

“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”

— James Joyce (Ulysses)

  

the Cliffs of Moher, Ireland. December 2017

 

more shots here:

andreatallone.tumblr.com/post/169350606746/cliffsofmoher

 

ZEN MAGNETS - Neodymium Magnetic Balls (@~1631) - Stegosaurus;

 

Contest Entry for: 58: Unlimited Zen Dinosaurs;

www.zenmagnets.com/blog/58-zen-dinosaurs/

 

Video: youtu.be/Nt-WRZBeu9s

 

I approached this by creating a core center blueprint to define the overall shape/proportions of the Head, rounded Body, and Tail shape silhouette using coupled layering. Next I build layers outward (on both sides) to provide the 3D body volume. From those layers, grew the front and rear legs, which continued the outward layering. The top plate radiators (normally split apart and staggered, but not feasible for this scale since they would have been too thick) were created using triangle to diamond shapes of varying sizes (tiny, small, medium, large). The quadruple spiked tail finished off this iconic herbivore dino. The completed build is completely solid and heavy.

 

The challenging aspects with this build include: how to generate a 3D look building outward, how to create the legs strong enough to support the body, how to get the rounded body profile layer by layer, how to balance & prevent the head and tail from tipping, and how to create and arrange the plates. Coupled magnetic fields across multi-stacked layers proved difficult to maintain alignments at times. Solidity density amplified the field attraction, especially when adding new single-layer components, causing strong attraction and/or deflection to target area affecting magnet positioning.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stegosaurus

 

Build Component Breakdown:

===========================================================

(@952)= Core Center head,body,tail(top-bottom = 2x(10+20+26+32+40+48+8+58+10+74+52+20+9+28+8+20+10 -> (1+2x4+1)+(1+2x9+1)+(1+2x12+1)+(1+2x15+1)+(1+2x19+1)+((1+2x23+1)+(1+2x3+1))+((1+2x31+1)+(1+2x4+1))+(1+2x36+1)+(1+2x25+1)+(1+2x9+1))+((2x4+1)+(1+2x16+1)+(1+2x3+1))+(1+2x6+1)+(1+2x4+1));

 

(@456)= 1st outer layer = 2x(3+8+11+14+17+(22+3)+(27+4)+35+35+(4+14)+13+18);

 

(@252)= 2nd outer layer = 2x(5+8+11+13+15+16+16+15+13+14);

 

(@080)= 2nd rear leg layer = 2x(3+4+5+4+6+5+4+3+3+3);

 

(@070)= 2nd front leg layer = 2x(2+3+(6x4)+3+3);

 

(@082)= 3rd rear leg layer = 2x(3+4+5+5+5+4+3+(3x2));

 

(@020)= 3rd front leg layer = 2x(2+3+3+3+(4x2)+1);

 

(@068)= Large plate - 4x(4x(9-ball triangle)-(1x2 mount point));

 

(@048)= Medium plate - 2x(4x(6 triangle));

 

(@032)= Small plate - 2x(2x(6 triangle)+4);

 

(@006)= Tiny plate - 2x3 triangle;

 

(@027)= Tail - 4x(4+1 spikes)+(6+1 tip);

 

================================================================

~1631 Total (approximate due to fine tuning and changing on fly)

With all my ❤️ I thank you for your ⭐ or 💬 or just for 👀 it.

A 📷 taken by me + Camera Raw + ps

 

THIS PHOTO IT'S NOT AI 📀

You can look at the Exif data on your right.➡️ in pc, and on phone below the comments 👇

 

Under the soft glow of the night, the majestic aqueduct of Segovia stands tall, a witness to centuries of history. Its stone, bathed in warm lighting, reveals every texture and arch with an eternal presence.

 

The long exposure captures the essence of the place, where history and modern life intertwine. The blurred figures of passersby contrast with the solidity of this Roman engineering masterpiece, reminding us of the fleeting nature of our presence compared to a structure that has defied time.

 

A tribute to the grandeur of the past and the magic of night photography.

A comfortable town car, but this Nagant’s roof rack gives it away as suitable for long-distance travel.

 

The driver worked partially in the open while the family (note the coat of arms on the doors) sheltered in a brocade-trimmed interior. Communication with the driver was made possible via a speaking tube. As with most cars of its time, the Nagant’s left side lantern has a green stripe to denote that side. In shipping however, the green marker denotes ‘starboard’, in other words, the right side. This 1909 Nagant was the first car of this make to be equipped with a driveshaft, and has never been restored.

 

It was delivered new to a customer in Maastricht. The plate of the Maastricht dealer is still fixed to the car. The bodywork was produced in Aachen and still bears its original paint.

 

The Nagant, which was manufactured in the Belgian city of Liège, was known for its solidity and reliability. Nagant was originally an arms and machine tools factory, but at the end of the 19th century it began producing cars. At the end of the 1920s Nagant was taken over by the Belgian Impéria-Excelsior company.

 

Louwman Museum

Den Haag - The Hague

Nederland - Netherlands

March 2013

frame by Borealnz

In every spiritual tradition, we talk about basic elements that are material and energetic, but since we know that every manifested thing is a trinity of matter, energy, and Consciousness, then we have to understand that the basic elements are also elements of Consciousness, not just matter and energy. The four primary elements—air, fire, water, earth—make up everything that we are, on every level. The important question we need to answer practically in our lives is how the four elements relate to the fifth element. How are we working with the fifth element? That is what we talked about in the previous lecture. The fifth element, literally “the quintessence,” relates to the Akash, the ether. In Sanskrit terms, we can also say that it is Kundalini. It is the Prakriti, the root energy that in some religions is symbolized as the Divine Mother.. The Divine Mother is that creative force or intelligence in nature that gives life to everything. If we want spiritual life, we need to know our Divine Mother. Her active agent is the quintessence, which is an energy in us. We need that energy to be active, and right now it is not. In us, it is passive, latent, what in science we could call "static, non-kinetic energy." Aphrodite Urania, the pure light of the Divine Mother. The method to awaken that energy, to activate it, has been hidden in every religion and mystical tradition. In the West, it is most famously known in the tradition we call Alchemy. The entire tradition of Alchemy is a symbolic presentation of a practical science. Alchemy hides the knowledge of how to elaborate the full potential of the human being, which is hidden in all of our atoms and cells. To do that, we need to know about transmutation. The Divine Mother is the fire of the Tree of Life

This word transmutation gets utilized a lot in esoteric traditions, but it appears as if it utilized without much knowledge of what the word really means. So it is important that we analyze this word and understand what it means, where it comes from, and what it implies. The word transmutation came into use because of the tradition of Alchemy, and is derived from Latin roots. The implications of the word transmutation are far beyond what most esoteric traditions attribute to it. Trans means “thoroughly,” and mutare means “change.” To transmute means to completely change something. In the modern Gnostic movement, for example, most students use this word transmutation exclusively in relation to sexual energy, which is a valid use of the word, but it is not its full meaning and not its original use. The word transmutation originally applied to our entire being, to everything about us. Really, to transmute comes from that famous phrase from Alchemy, "to transmute lead into gold." It means to purge the lead, which is a dense, heavy, and impure metal, and reduce it into its quintessence—in other words, to reduce it to the most basic components that originally made it, and from that, to perfect it. Everything that exists is constructed out of the basic elements that we explained in the previous lecture. First is the Akash or ether, and that becomes particularized into air, fire, water, and earth. Those four basic elements, which are physical, energetic, and conscious, become everything that exists. Everything that we are is made of four elements arranged and particularized into particular sequences. Physically, we call this encoding DNA, which is not merely physical chemicals, but also encodes energetic and spiritual data, as combinations of elements. Those elements are physically sequenced in series combinations of molecules that are arranged in infinite combinations to create everything that we are. Those sequences of four are reflections of the four elements. Similarly, the four subtle elements are reflected in the four basic components of physical matter:“For the most comprehensive and lucid exposition of occult pneumatology (the branch of philosophy dealing with spiritual substances) extant, mankind is indebted to Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), prince of alchemists and Hermetic philosophers and true possessor of the Royal Secret (the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life). Paracelsus believed that each of the four primary elements known to the ancients (earth, fire, air, and water) consisted of a subtle, vaporous principle and a gross corporeal substance.“Air is, therefore, twofold in nature-tangible atmosphere and an intangible, volatile substratum which may be termed spiritual air. Fire is visible and invisible, discernible and indiscernible--a spiritual, ethereal flame manifesting through a material, substantial flame. Carrying the analogy further, water consists of a dense fluid and a potential essence of a fluidic nature. Earth has likewise two essential parts--the lower being fixed, terreous, immobile; the higher, rarefied, mobile, and virtual. The general term elements has been applied to the lower, or physical, phases of these four primary principles, and the name elemental essences to their corresponding invisible, spiritual constitutions. Minerals, plants, animals, and men live in a world composed of the gross side of these four elements, and from various combinations of them construct their living organisms.“Henry Drummond, in Natural Law in the Spiritual World, describes this process as follows: "If we analyse this material point at which all life starts, we shall find it to consist of a clear structureless, jelly-like substance resembling albumen or white of egg. It is made of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Its name is protoplasm. And it is not only the structural unit with which all living bodies start in life, but with which they are subsequently built up. 'Protoplasm,' says Huxley, 'simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the Potter.'"“The water element of the ancient philosophers has been metamorphosed into the hydrogen of modern science; the air has become oxygen; the fire, nitrogen; the earth, carbon.” - Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages For us to become something new, we need to unzip the sequence that makes who we are, and reconnect it in a superior way. But how are you going to disarrange everything about yourself, and rearrange it? Especially when you are the one trying to do it. Not easy! But this is what to "transmute" really means. It means “to thoroughly change.” Gnosis is a science of transmutation. Yes, it begins with sexual energy, that is the root energy that makes the full and complete transmutation possible, but we do not seek to only transmute sexual energy. We want to transmute all of our matter, all of our Consciousness, our psyche, our soul: everything. We want to thoroughly change: to transmute. Interestingly, the result of that transmutation is a mutant. A mutant is someone who is different, who is changed. This word “mutant” has a negative connotation nowadays, but in reality every existing creature is a mutation, a mutant. What we want is a conscious mutation, a change for the better. We want a change towards something beneficial and positive, something useful, something that will bring harmony and peace, not discord and violence. We want a change that will bring about goodness, equality, harmony, love. For that type of change, we need to thoroughly change the causes of discord, the causes of suffering, and those causes are within us, in our matter, our energy, and our Consciousness. A genuine transmutation requires that the causes or the origins of problems and pain, suffering, are changed thoroughly, so that new effects can emerge. That change is not easy. If you consider how anything in nature changes, fundamentally changes, its a process of birth, growth, decline, death, rebirth, growth, decline and death. This is how evolution advances, through small mutations over time. If you have ever studied biology or evolution, you can see that this is how species grow. They grow because of the pressures put on them by their environment. They change, and adapt, and hopefully improve. We need the same thing. Unfortunately, we are not responding properly to the pressures that are upon us. In response to the psychological, material, social, and physical pressures that are on us now, we are not mutating ourselves properly. If we were, we would be transcending the problems. We would be adapting and overcoming them so that they would not be problems anymore. Instead, we see that the problems are deepening, that we are not changing fast enough, and in the right way. We need to know how to do it, how to transmute. Samael Aun Weor said:“No one can Self-realize without transmutation.” - Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah .In this context, he was not talking about sexual transmutation, he was talking about transmutation of the psyche, the mind, the heart, and the body: to change thoroughly. Stated in another way, you can transmute your sexual energy, but if you do not transmute your mind, you will not self-realize. three-pillarsWhen we study the Tree of Life, our primary interest is how it applies to us here and now. The Tree of Life maps all of the levels of existence. But those levels of existence are meaningless if we cannot access them. Studying and memorizing scriptures and teachings mean nothing if we cannot experience what they point towards. We need to examine this Tree of Life in relation with ourselves, and understand that these ten sephiroth relate to levels of being within us. Here on this graphic we see not only our physical state but our psychological state, so on this image while we see a physical body to remind us that this relates to us here and now, really all these spheres or levels show our levels of psychology. Symbolized here are two divisions, two sides. The superior part is related to the heavens or superior aspects of being. The inferior part that hangs below is called Klipoth or hell, and this aspect relates to the inferior or inverted aspect of our psyche. Everything on this map is composed of elements: air, fire, water and earth. All of this is suspended in or supported by the Akash.

So in this context, if we use our imagination and we look at how this applies to us here and now, everything about us is encoded, in elements. Here physically, we can sense those physical aspects: our physical body is an encoded series of elements, which is reflected in our DNA. But as well, our entire psychological make up is encoded in us. Sadly, we only hazily perceive it. We hazily perceive it as thoughts and feelings, and certain types of sensations physically. But we do not perceive or comprehend that all of the thoughts, feelings, and impulses are driven by matter and energy that is not physical. This is a real problem that we have. Really, open up your imagination, and analyze yourself: look at how you have a physical body here and now. This body is composed of a trinity of elements: matter, energy, and Consciousness. The Consciousness here is not awake, it is very asleep, but there is some degree of Consciousness or perception. Thoughts, feelings, and other impulses are more subtle that physical matter, but still we can perceive that they have some level of manifestation. We can verify that they are there, somehow. They also have matter, energy, and Consciousness, but not in the physical dimension. Those thoughts that you sense, and the feelings that you sense, are modifications of Consciousness that have matter and energy associated with them, but not physically. What we experience physically is their reflection, like light being bounced through a mirror. We have the mirror of our mind, which reflects the contents of our thoughts and feelings, but where are the thoughts? Where are the feelings? They are not in the brain, because you can experience thoughts and feelings when you are out of your body. So where are they? This is the problem we have: we do not know. The problem is compounded because we need to change. Rapidly. Otherwise, we are threatened with grave problems, even worse problems then we have now. We need to transmute all of these psychological elements, very quickly. How, if we cannot see them? If we cannot sense them, how can we change them? How can you work in the dark? How can a blind person create a piece of art if he cannot even see what he is doing? This is our fundamental challenge. Psychologically, spiritually, we are blind. How then can we create a perfect soul, if we cannot see what we are doing? How can we transmute ourselves into something better, if we cannot even see who we really are? For this, we need help. We need to understand how these elements work, in all of the levels of nature. So to remind you, these are the five elements. Space

Air Fire Water Earth All things are composed by these elements; understanding that, we need to look at how those elements manifest in us. We need to analyze our psychology, to see it for what it is. Let me remind you of the previous lecture: these elements do not refer to the literal physical aspects, they are psychological. Expansiveness Mobility

Temperature Fluidity Solidity In order to transmute yourself, you need to know what you are working with, you need to see yourself, you need to see how your mind and heart functions, how all of the sensations you experience flow. You need to see what parts of your psyche are expansive, what is the relative mobility of your thinking and feeling, what about its temperature? Its fluidity and solidity? In this way, you can analyze the elements that are involved. You can understand how to manage the elements in your experiences, psychologically. As we explained in the previous lecture, we get help with that process through what we call ordeals, psychological challenges that are given by our own Innermost, through our psychological trainer, who presents us with scenarios designed to bring out those parts of ourselves that we need to work on. If we are not prepared to see it, we will respond poorly, the way that we have been doing previously, and we will make our situation worse. If we are not psychologically trained to watch ourselves and look for the patterns in our psychology, we will not see what is really happening to us, and we will make mistakes. When you enter into this type of work and the process of starting to transmute yourself, you are given challenges, opportunities to see yourself as you are, and those opportunities will come every day. If you are really attentive, you will find that those opportunities are continually arising, all the time. We do not call them opportunities physically, we call them adversities, problems, suffering. We have all of our complaints. We have an old psychological habit that is a very serious obstacle in this type of study, this type of work. That is the habit of self-esteem. Its an old habit that thinks we deserve things that we do not deserve, and that wants things to be ideal, the way that we want it, and we get very frustrated and upset when things do not go the way that we want or expect. I am curious: what percentage of people listening to the lecture today are very disappointed they did not win the lottery last night? I would like to find that out, but I do not think anyone would tell me.

We all have this self-esteem, and it is in direct conflict with the Innermost, with the Being, because this “self” of self-esteem is the ego. The Being wants the ego dead. Dead. Dissolved. Transmuted...But we do not want to transmute it. We want things the way we want them, and when we do not get things the way we want them, what do we do? We complain. We complain in our mind, and we complain with our mouth. Many of us complain all the time. That is a sign, a very significant sign, that we are not transmuting. Another word for transmutation is transformation. We use that in a very important phrase in this teaching: the transformation of impressions. Someone who is transforming impressions has serenity, acceptance. In other words, they have no complaints.

So if we have a lot of complaints, we need to analyze the desires that are complaining: the complaining pride, the lust, the envy, the greed, the gluttony, the fear, the avarice, the laziness, all of those egos. And we need to analyze them in relation with the elements: space, air, fire, water and earth, to understand how they are made, how they work, how they function. In this work, we need to learn to not just go with the flow of our psychological river, but to fight it. The psychological river of our mind is flowing into hell. It is not taking us to God. To reach God, divinity, purity, you have to fight against everything that comes up in yourself that is impure, that is selfish. That fight is not easy. four-ordeals

The four elements are the basic tools that our psychological trainer uses in order to show us ourselves, to show us what we're made of—literally, what we (as a psyche) are made of. Not physically, psychologically. The physical part is impermanent and irrelevant. Spiritually speaking, we have had so many physical bodies in the past and may have more in the future, thus in the long term perspective the physical part is not as important as the psychological part, because the psychological part lasts, and is the determining factor as to whether we get more physical bodies, and what kind, and in what circumstances. Focusing on physicality is foolish. Focusing on psychology is wise. In the psychological point of view, what are we made of? We are made of these elements in different combinations, but unfortunately corrupted with desire. In order to transmute these elements, we have to break them down. Imagine if you were a weaver and you got really drunk and wove something, using up all your good cloth, your good fibers and materials; then you sobered up and realized that what you wove was a complete disaster and wouldn't do anybody any good, in fact it was a waste of all that material, but it was the only material that you had, and you need clothes... What do you do? You have to take it apart. You have to go back to zero. You have to be naked, and start again. We need to do that psychologically; we need to strip our identity completely: this self-esteem has to die. We have to renounce everything except God. To only hold fast to divinity. Nothing else. This is the only way that you can fully and completely transmute. Remember: transmute means to throughly change—thoroughly, not partially. Thoroughly, from the ground up, from zero. It is the only way to build something properly. This is why that Jesus told us that we need a new wineskin. “No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was [taken] out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved.” - Jesus, in Luke 5 We need a new garment. A new mind. A new heart. A new body. That transmutation comes through these elements, so we are tested, every day, constantly, by our trainer, through these elements, to pull things out psychologically so we will see them for what they are. This is not for fun or games or just to punish us and humiliate us, it is not to make us suffer, just because we deserve it. It is to help us. It is the medicine we need; we are sick. To be healed, we need a very profound surgery, very deep, very painful. It is not easy. It is not easy to die psychologically. It is not pleasant. It is not something that you will enjoy. You will be in pain. You will cry. You will have regret. You will have remorse. You will be ashamed of yourself. And you should be. Don't avoid it. Embrace it, yet do not attach to it. Look squarely at the facts, accept them, and change. This is how you become spiritually mature. You do not avoid the facts. You look them in the face, you see them for what they are, and you change them. Thoroughly. When you are getting your psychological challenges every day, look them square in the face, accept them, accept responsibility for yourself, do not blame others, do not blame God, accept it, look at it and say, "I deserve this, I created this, now I'm going to change it". This is what a Master comes from. Everybody wonders, "How do the Masters become so beautiful? How do they become so humble, so pure?"... because they are honest. That is how. Because they are honest. They do not avoid the facts. They work hard to change, to become worthy of reflecting God.

The way that this is done is through this fifth element. Everything that we are is constructed of these basic elements. So our pride for example is constructed of the four elements. The humility of an angel is constructed from the same elements that your pride is made from. Isn't that odd? Its constructed of the same light, but arranged differently. The “pride” of an angel—that element, that light, that has to do with virtue of esteem or self nature—is not corrupted by desire, whereas ours is corrupted. What we call “pride” is a modified light that comes from the sun. It is the same light that shines in an angel, but in an angel it shines as humility. Its the same light, but in us, it is modified, corrupted. What shines in that psychological component is the quintessence. But in us, it is impure. In an angel, in a master, it is pure. The word quintessence comes from a root word which means: "To be":

esse "to be." Sanskrit asmi, Hittite eimi, O.C.S. jesmi, Lith. esmi, Goth. imi, O.E. eom "I am"The quintessence hidden in each element within us is the Being, the light of the Being, that shines through any psychological element. Everything that we are as a psyche is the light of the Being, but in us that light is trapped in corruption. If you want that light to shine pure, you need to break apart the lens and reform it to make it perfect, clean. This is the basic science of Alchemy: to purge the metals and make them pure. We could remove the word metals and instead use crystals or lenses, and it would mean the same thing. The quintessence is that light, what in Hebrew is called Shekinah, the light of the Divine Mother. That light shines through everything that we are, psychologically and physically. It shines as all of those elements arranged in all of those different patterns that make up all of the different people and things and plants and animals and minerals and everything that exist; everything is that light, but modified. What we are as a person is a huge complication of all those lights. “And אלהים Elohim said, Let there be מארת ma'owroth [lights] in the firmament of שמים shamayim to divide the day from ליל layil [night]. And let them be מאורת ma'owroth in the firmament of שמים shamayim to give איר owr [light] upon ארץ erets [the earth]...” - Genesis 1:15 We do not see the lights for what they are. We need to analyze ourselves physically, energetically, emotionally, intellectually, and consciously.

This graphic shows the basic psyche that we can perceive here and now, if we look. All of the psychological elements that we can perceive here and now are related to other forms of matter. Physically, we perceive our physical body. If you pay attention, you will recognize that this physical body has energy that allows it to be active and move, the energy of digestion and the circulation of blood, and the energy that flows through the muscles, in the senses and nerves. five-bodies. We also have energy that flows through the psyche, that let us us have imagination and memory and thought, feeling. All of those energies are related with the vital body, what in the Tree of Life is called Yesod (“foundation”). The vital body reflects the contents of thought, emotion, and will into the physical body. Everything we perceive physically is reflected, either through the five physical senses, or through the internal senses that we perceive inside. The vital body reflects those contents into our brain, into our heart. This is important to understand so that we have a clear perspective on how to analyze ourselves. When we are feeling emotions, those emotions do not originate in the physical body. They are not just imaginary. They are reflected forms of light. They are light that we feel and sense emotionally in the physical body, but is being reflected to the physical body from our Astral body, through the vital body. The light of emotion originates in the Astral body. That means that if we are feeling a negative emotion, full comprehension and elimination of that defect is only possible by working on it at that level, with the Astral body in the fifth dimension, where its originating. But how many of us have clairvoyance? How many of us are awake in the astral plane, in the fifth dimension, to work on that discursive negative emotion? None of us, we are asleep! Moreover, when we sleep at night and we are dreaming with those emotions, we do not remember them when we come back to our body. So our trainer has no choice but to give us ordeals in the physical world so that we can see and experience what is happening in that Astral body, so that it is reflected here physically, so that it can come up and we will work on it. Internally, consciously, we are asleep and enslaved, so to help us, our trainer gives us ordeals. Our trainer puts us in circumstances where we feel those emotions, so that our Consciousness, our willpower, can see it, and can respond consciously, not mechanically, but can comprehend and free itself. This is why we have ordeals. We need them. Do not complain about your problems. Learn from them. They are your path to liberation. In several places of the Bible it states very clearly: “For whom יהוה loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son [in whom] he delighteth.” - Proverbs 3:12 The chastisement or ordeals are given as help to help us and aid us, otherwise we will not see who we are, and what is stopping us from reaching God. So this applies to all of our emotions, all of our thoughts, all of our problems, all of our situations, all of our circumstances, everything thats bothering us or that we think is limiting us, or is a problem for us, is actually something that we need to take advantage of. That is why Samael Aun Weor said: “We must learn how to take advantage of the worst adversities. The worst adversities bring us the best opportunities. We must learn to smile before all adversities.” “People protest because of the difficulties that interaction offers them. They do not want to realize that those difficulties are precisely providing them with the necessary opportunities for the dissolution of their “I.” So why are all the spiritual students, including the so-called Gnostics , looking for easy lives? Students are trying to win the lottery, longing to retire in the countryside and grow sunflowers, longing to retreat from their problems. Listen: if you have an easy, laid back life, you will stagnate spiritually. You will rot. If you want to grow spiritually, you need to die psychologically. The only way you will do that is by seeing the garbage in your mind and in your heart. That is why we are given ordeals. “During times of rigorous temptations [ordeals], discouragement and desolation, one must appeal to the intimate Remembering of the Self.“Deep within each one of us is the Aztec Tonantzin, Stella Maris, the Egyptian Isis, God the Mother, waiting for us in order to heal our painful heart.“When one gives to oneself the shock of “Self-remembering,” then indeed, a miraculous change [transmutation] in the entire work of the body is produced, so that the cells receive a different nourishment.” - Samael Aun Weor. That is why Samael said:“We can disintegrate our defects and dissolve the psychological “I” only by means of this science of transmutations. We can modify our errors, transmute the vile metals into pure gold and command only by means of the science of transmutations.” - Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah. In The Gnostic Bible, The Pistis Sophia Unveiled, he said: “It is possible to crystallize the Soul within ourselves by dissolving the animal ego.“We need to dissolve the undesirable psychological elements in order to crystallize the Soul within ourselves.

“We must convert ourselves into pure Soul. With patience you will possess your Soul.“This is possible based on conscious work and voluntary sufferings. “The Souls of the people reside in a superior level of the Being.“The Soul is the conjunction of all the forces, powers, virtues, essences, etc., that crystallize within us when the entire animal ego has been dissolved.

“Each time that a psychological defect is dissolved, a virtue, a power, etc., crystallizes within our interior. “The complete dissolution of all the defects implies the integral crystallization of the Soul within ourselves. “If the water does not boil at one hundred degrees, that which must be crystallized does not crystallize, and that which must be dissolved is not dissolved.

“In similar form, we say that it is necessary to pass through great emotional crisis in order to dissolve psychological defects and crystallize the Soul.” Firstly, this is accomplished based on conscious work and voluntary suffering. Voluntary suffering means that we accept our suffering, we do not fight it, in the sense of resisting it or denying it or trying to change our physical circumstances all of the time. Instead we accept it, we do what we need to do in order to survive, and care for our responsibilities, and that's enough. The rest of our effort should be focused on changing ourselves. The soul is the conjunction of all the powers, virtues, etc., and they crystalize within us when the animal ego has been dissolved: that is transmutation. Each construction in the psyche is made of the elements. We dissolve each ego in order to liberate the light in each of the elements that are there, then automatically, spontaneously, the light emerges as the soul. In other words, the quintessence is freed. From there is a great range of potential. What happens with that energy next depends on the nature of our path. But whatever the nature of that path, it will be positive, since the light has been liberated. The other important point here is “if the water does not boil at one hundred degrees, that which must be crystalized does not crystalize, and that which must dissolve does not dissolve.” What is that water? Water is one of the elements. Where is the water in us? What water is it that must boil? Anybody know? Well, this is a sort of trick question, because everything about us is based on water. There is no exception. In the Hebrew letters are the three mother letters that we mentioned previously. mother-letters-three-brains..The element of water is represented by the letter Mem. The element water and the letter Mem are related with the vital body. That is the lower Eden or Mayim in the book of Genesis. “And אלהים Elohiym said, Let the מים mayim (waters) under שמים shamayim be gathered together unto one place…” - Genesis 1:9 yesod-body-croppedThe sephirah Yesod, the ninth sphere, is our creative waters, from which we create everything, physically, spiritually, psychologically. Those are our creative waters, the waters of Genesis within us. From Yesod, the sexual organs, was made our earth, our physical body. “And אלהים Elohiym said, Let the מים mayim (waters) under שמים shamayim be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry [land] appear: and it was so. And אלהים Elohiym called the dry [land] ארץ 'erets [earth, our body]; and the gathering together of the waters called he ים yam [seas]…” - Genesis 1:9-10 The physical body is mostly water. Without it we cannot live. The emotional body (Astral body) is very strongly influenced by water. Our emotions are a sea. The Mental body also is constructed with the element of water. The Causal body is made from the waters. Water is in everything. Everything that exists depends on water. Physically, energetically and consciously. So when the water must boil, that means that our entire psyche must boil. What is the boiling? The problems, difficulties. When you study how physics works, when you study how nature works, you find that crystallization and dissolution are very closely related. The entire science of Alchemy is based upon this understanding. This is why if you study any of the old alchemical texts, they always talk about the need to dissolve and coagulate or crystalize. The entire science of Alchemy is based upon that. One short example is from the Bosom Book of George Ripley (circa 1476): “Then mingle with this white calx [dusty residue remaining after a mineral or metal has been calcined or roasted] the fiery water [שמים shamayim], and distil it with a strong fire all off as before, and calcine the earth [ארץ 'erets] again that remaineth in the bottom of the still, and then distil it again with a strong fire as before, and again calcine it, and thus distil and calcine it seven times, until all the substance of the calx be lifted up by the limbec: and then thou hast the water [מים mayim] of life rectified and made indeed spiritual; and so hast thou the four elements exalted in the virtue of their quintessence. This water will dissolve all bodies, and putrefy them, and purge them: and this is our Mercury and our Lunary; and whosoever thinketh there is any other water than this is an ignorant and a fool, and shall never be able to come to the effect.”This is only one example of hundreds of writings like it. This excerpt explains that the process of purification and the elaboration of the quintessence is a process of dissolution and crystallization.

For centuries, foolish people lacking initiation into the actual science read these things literally and thought they were talking about literal water, literal physical mercury, literal physical elements. That is wrong. These scriptures are about the psyche, the mind. The dissolution is psychological, and it is accomplished through ordeals, through analyzing and dissolving impurities in the mind. Symbolically, we analyze the elements of the mind as having seven fundamental qualities, related to the seven lights that organize all things.

 

gnosticteachings.org/courses/alchemy/3076-transmutation.html

  

From Historicplaces.ca

 

Haultain School is a late nineteenth century, one and one half-storey building situated on 30 lots comprising roughly 0.98 hectares of land in Calgary's Beltline community. The school embodies the Richardsonian Romanesque style and features a rough-faced sandstone exterior with sandstone lintels, sills, and arches, a medium-pitched hip roof with pronounced overhangs, and a sandstone entabliture above the front entrance inscribed with "HAULTAIN SCHOOL 1892 1922".

 

Haultain School is a remarkable architectural statement - an early and small-scale adaptation of the Richardson Romanesque style. This style, made popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century, was typically employed on large-scale civic and religious buildings. The appearance of this style in western Canada in 1894 - only four years after its embodiment in Toronto's City Hall - is surprising, as is its expression in a building of such modest scale. The Richardson Romanesque style derives from, but also expands, the Romanesque Revival architectural vision that was commonly used for western Canadian schools of this period. Elements of the Richardson Romanesque style include the rock-faced sandstone exterior and contrasting elements, the round arched windows, and the horizontal stringcourse at the base of the building. Combined, these features create a sense of weightiness and solidity that is reinforced by the low-pitched roof with wide eave overhangs that imparts the building with a robust horizontality. Calgary's first sandstone school, first school with electricity and running water, and first school embodying Richardson Romanesque architecture, the building was a pioneering construction in the late nineteenth century.

  

Ruth Asawa began making art as a teenager while forcibly detained by the US government in an internment camp during World War II alongside her family and thousands of other people of Japanese descent, including animators from Walt Disney, who helped her learn to draw and paint. After moving to San Francisco in 1949, Asawa began constructing suspended sculptures, transforming everyday industrial materials – rough brass, steel, and heavy copper wire – into sinuous and graceful spherical forms, which, although three-dimensional in volume, do not contain any interior mass. Inspired by a basket weaving technique learned during a 1947 summer trip to Mexico while she was at Black Mountain College, Asawa’s looped-wire sculptures like Untitled (S.030, Hanging Eight Separate Cones Suspended through Their Centers; c. 1952) are grounded in the singular qualities of her chosen material. Making use of wire’s capacity for malleability, translucency, and solidity, the hanging sculpture Untitled (S.101, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form; c. 1962) is comprised of a series of translucent wire cocoons – a form that gives the work’s surface a womblike identity. In their suggestion of waves, plants, and trees, Asawa’s supple forms make particular use of the formal connection between the interior and exterior surfaces of the work, a relationship that the artist long described as interdependent and integral.

 

Madeline Weisburg

 

www.labiennale.org/en/art/2022/leaf-gourd-shell-net-bag-s...

"If it were possible to place you in my brain, and let you roam in and out of my thought waves, you would never have to ask: "Why do you love me?""

  

Beltway / Exit Scott 👼✨

 

Beltway / Exit Scott (Slowed+Screwed) ️💞✨

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Iris skin from Pumec on Evo X Briannon

Beauty Marks from Veechi

Mohanna Arm Henna by Carol G

Bindi from Neha Beauty

XFies Eyeshadow from Top1Salon

EGirl Stamps from Hera

HD Liquid Lip from Toop1Salon

Solidity Nails from Rosary

Tumelo Hair by Sintiklia

La Celine Chain Jewelry Set from The Owl

Zodiac Nameplate from Sevenonline store 7;]

Kiona Leotard from Plush

Hati Boots from Pare

   

From my series: $fullImage = array_sum([0.5, 0.5]);

 

Caught in a monochrome dream where steel meets sky, the bones of our urban jungle stand tall. Each beam, a note in the symphony of structure, plays its part in holding up the canvas upon which our city stories are painted

 

In this split-frame monochrome composition, the left side reveals an angular view of a modern building—an architectural marvel that defies gravity. Its geometric glass and steel structure pierces the sky, a testament to human ingenuity. The right frame, a close-up, unveils the intricate steel framework of another building. Clear lines and angles intersect against the soft, diffused light of the sky. Here, solidity meets ethereal beauty, and the urban landscape becomes a canvas for our collective narratives.

 

Kamera: Kodak Ektar H35

Film: Agfa APX 100

Devloper: Ars Imago R9

 

AI-generated caption by Copilot

 

Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany

 

German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.

 

The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.

 

The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.

 

Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany

 

German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.

 

The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.

 

The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.

 

Well into the summertime snowline on the approaches to the top of Mount Rainier in Washington State, USA in 1999. We didn't go all the way to the summit, which sits at well over 12,000ft high, where the air is somewhat thin. The summit is also covered with several glaciers and some evidence of the mountain's true nature; that of a dormant volcano, with fumaroles and volcanic gases making some of the solidity of the rock rather unpredictable to climbers and hikers. Definitely not a summit climb to be attempted without full equipment and an expert guide. This stunningly beautiful volcano is also considered one of the world's most dangerous, because the explosion is likely to be cataclysmic owing to the poor quality of the rock caused by acidic volcanic gas and acidified melt water eating away at the flanks and interior of the mountain. The original was taken using a Nikon F70 SLR with a Sigma 17-35mm AF-D ultra-wide zoom lens. Film used was Kodak Ektachrome E100S commercially processed. Scanned using a Plustek 8200i film scanner and processed from the Raw file using Capture One Pro 20.